Welcome to NowThenSeeHere.com.  

This site records my ongoing photographic projects inspired by the places I’ve lived and stories I've encountered.

My passion for photography began in the juncture of science and art nurtured in a darkroom steeped in the tang of sodium thiosulfate and acetic acid. That spark first ignited in the barren, sun-bleached landscapes of West Texas. Over time, travels across the globe broadened that interest while offering chances to document the beautiful, the brutal, and sometimes surreal environments I've called home. Many of those moments are demonstrated here.

Today, I’m drawn to the enduring antiquity of monochrome imagery. My work in digital still lifes and pictorialism keeps me aligned with the aesthetic traditions of the photographic masters who came before.

I’m published in Trees and People because clearly, both foliage and humans enjoy my work. I also snagged a first-place award in a worldwide photography competition, which I like to think means at least one judge said, “Yep, he’s the one.”  For four years, I chased fast-moving athletes with a camera as a contract sports photographer. It was fun, but eventually I traded courts and baseline volleys for weeds and whimsy. Those Blooming Weeds—my backyard ode to common flora—was exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, Colorado. Gallery 1516 in Omaha, Nebraska also welcomed my other work which was thrilling because honestly, who doesn’t love a gallery wall?  And yes, I’m humbled to have been named a top 200 finalist in a global Critical Mass competition hosted by Photolucida. That puts me in elite company—roughly the population of a small village and I’ll take it. The Colorado State Capital is now home to one of my images.

I make updates as new projects develop.

If you're here to browse, reflect, read “Thoughts” or simply wander through the imagery, I’m glad you stopped by.

Thoughts on DEI and Photographic Merit

The photography world has become a place where invoking support for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists is treated as both armor and ornament.  DEI statements are a gallery’s way of stepping into a dining room and abruptly shouting, “I didn’t poison the food!”—a strange preemptive denial, defending a front that’s not under attack.  This “assurance” speaks louder than the artwork itself.

Regardless of the assurance, inclusion without keen discernment doesn’t elevate photography.  Inclusion reduces photography to a quota, not a craft. Let’s be blunt: DEI in photography is fear dressed up as diplomacy. 

Contemporary photography, with its robust embrace of LGBTQ+, and BIPOC, or simply queer perspectives, often carries the aura of progress. Galleries and websites swell with representation, DEI statements ring out from websites, then walls fill with drag portraiture and the dull pink and purple glow of inclusive lighting.  But beneath this “inclusion wave,” something critically important is fading: the keen pursuit of photographic excellence.

Let’s articulate what’s avoided: “Being LGBTQ+, BIPOC, or queer isn’t a qualification for creating great photography.” Identity, while perhaps meaningful to some, doesn’t substitute for visual sophistication, formal risk, or conceptual ambition. Increasingly, exhibitions prioritize narrative over nuance, and biography over superior craft. Aesthetics are reduced to clichés. The result: identity photography, once urgent and defiant, now feels like a genre running on low-fuel autopilot.  The repetition is numbing. Subjects that were once bold are now, frankly, ordinary.

Do curators and gallery owners bear responsibility for this fatigue? In their attempts to advance the “underrepresented,” it seems some have allowed identity to eclipse photography itself. It’s not that the photographers lack skill.  It’s that institutions keep asking the same questions and rewarding the same answers. Worse, they have allowed this flattening to persist without offering any vision of where the DEI state is actually headed. What does this future look like? Is there a difference in the current climate compared to what “right” looks like? Will representation mean simply showing up with a tattered rainbow flag, or can it still mean showing complexity, contradiction, even discomfort?  No one seems quite sure and that ambiguity appears to have metastasized into a bit of curatorial stagnation.

Who are the “underrepresented” photographers in this moment? The term once stood for invisibility in the canon. Now, it’s used so liberally that its meaning is blurred. Is it about access? About acclaim? About the kind of work that gets exhibited or the kind that doesn’t fit the current politically correct mold?  These questions deserve clarity.  Without clarity, institutions risk using “underrepresented” as branding rather than a legitimate step to inquiry.

Let’s refocus on excellence. It’s time to free ourselves from intersectional photography and identity art’s increasingly narrow confines. Representation should not be an excuse to neglect the rigor of excellent craft.  Minor White’s mystical abstractions didn’t wait for cultural permission to be challenging. Robert Mapplethorpe’s polished provocations didn’t simplify queer life to palatable symbolism.  They made work that provoked hard thought that bit even harder. Their legacy is not just who they were, but how they made us look deeply, sometimes uncomfortably, and always differently.

If institutions care about representation, they should stop staging inclusion and start more rigorous investigation. Let photography be clear.  Let photography be demanding and free of imagery that does little more than signal identity.

The goal in photography is not mere identity or defending a front that isn’t under attack. The goal is excellence grounded in merit. Only when work is judged by its quality, not its affiliations, can we honestly admire all photographers for what they achieve.

Thoughts on Photography as Demonstration Rather Than Presentation

Photography is photography.  It is not a presentation.  Instead, it is a demonstration.  This distinction appears subtle at first, yet it reaches into the philosophical core of what photography is and what it is meant to do.  A presentation attempts to persuade through arrangement, polish, and performance.  A demonstration, by contrast, reveals.  It points toward evidence.  It says, “Look here.  This existed.  This occurred.  This was seen.”  The camera, in its purest use, is not a stage director but a significant witness.

Modern visual culture often treats photography as presentation.  Images are designed for approval, branding, advertising, or self-construction.  They are arranged to flatter the subject or manipulate you the viewer.  Lighting is softened, imperfections removed, colors exaggerated, and narratives carefully edited.  In this framework, the photograph becomes less about reality and more about impression.  The image functions merely as rhetoric.  It seeks applause rather than understanding.

Yet photography possesses a fundamentally different nature from painting or graphic design.  A photograph begins with light reflected from an actual object or event.  Even when altered, its foundation remains rooted in physical reality.  The lens records rather than invents.  Because of this relationship to the world, photography carries evidentiary power.  The viewer instinctively assumes that something in front of the camera once existed.  Thus, photography operates most honestly as a demonstration: a showing of form, texture, space, character, time, and place.

The greatest documentary photographers understood this.  Their work did not merely “present” subjects attractively; it demonstrated conditions of life.  The photographs of workers during the Depression, soldiers in war, or families in migration endure because they reveal truths that words alone struggle desperately to communicate.  Their cameras demonstrated hardship, dignity, exhaustion, fear, and resilience.  These images were not arguments in the abstract.  They were visible and enduring proof.

Even artistic photography often succeeds most deeply when it demonstrates rather than presents.  A portrait demonstrates personality through posture, expression, and gesture.  A landscape demonstrates atmosphere and the grandeur of scale.  Street photography demonstrates that fleeting geometry of ordinary life.  The photographer’s task is not necessarily to beautify but to reveal.  Revelation may include beauty, but beauty is secondary to honesty.

Do you see that this concept also explains why many technically imperfect photographs remain powerful? Grain, blur, uneven exposure, or awkward framing do not automatically destroy a photograph’s value if the image demonstrates something real and meaningful.  Some of the most memorable photographs in history are visually rough because the urgency of the moment outweighed formal perfection.  The viewer responds not to polish but to authenticity.

To think of photography as demonstration also disciplines the photographer.  It encourages observation instead of performance.  The photographer becomes attentive to what is already present rather than obsessed with constructing spectacle.  Patience replaces manipulation.  Seeing replaces decorating.  The camera transcends being an instrument of vanity and becomes an instrument of intense inquiry.

This does not mean photography cannot involve interpretation.  Every choice of lens, framing, timing, and exposure reflects the photographer’s judgment.  However, interpretation differs from fabrication.  Demonstration allows the subject to retain its integrity.  Presentation risks subordinating the subject to the photographer’s whims.

Ultimately, photography’s deepest strength lies in its ability to testify.  It demonstrates that a moon rose, a wall stood, a child laughed, a war happened, or a weed bloomed.  In a world increasingly obsessed by digital imagery and the foolish pursuit of online approval, photography retains its value only when it resists the temptation to become another carefully curated performance. Instead, photography must demonstrate reality, however inconvenient or unflattering we think that reality might be.