I started working professionally in photography in 1959. So the sixties were a time of exploration for me.

Using a variety of  films, developers, papers, lenses etc. Bulk loading films for economy and for the adventure of using films not otherwise available. For a while I used gray window mats on dry mounted gray boards.

Exploring a variety of subject matter, jazz clubs, street shooting, still life, nature, portrait, nudes, etc. And using 35mm,both range finder and single lens reflex,  2 ¼ and 4×5 cameras.  Using daylight, tungsten, and strobe lights.

Panchromatic, orthochromatic and infrared films, mostly black and white but some color both negative and slides and even some Polaroid were used. Some of these films were done for a while and never again, and others were followed through out my career.

Coming from Youngstown, Ohio, I was captivated by the visual New York. The buildings, both tenements and sky scrapers, used book stores, the jazz clubs, Chinatown, little Italy, the lower east side, the upper west side, all of it. The Staten island ferry, Chinatown at dawn for roast duck wonton.

The camera stores around herald square, the pawn shops with a zillion cameras in the windows, the used book stores on 4th avenue, the several radio rows.

The people seeming oblivious to their surroundings gave me an impulse to grab them and say,

“Hey! Look at that!”

I much admired the New York City photography of W. Eugene Smith and WeeGee but I had no interest in emulating them. I could not have copied them if I tried, not then, not now.

My biggest influences were the guys I worked for, the fine commercial photographer Dave Sussman, and the great Painter and photographer Ralston Crawford. I began to see what got my attention in the ground glass and viewfinder. It was the space between objects. It was the visual relationship between objects or shapes.