I grew up in Rochester, New York, where I received my first serious camera for my fifteenth birthday. Encouraged by my father, who had a darkroom in the basement, and by my zany high school friends, I began taking pictures. In 1969 I moved to New York to attend Barnard College, but left school in 1971 to become a freelance photographer.
From 1972 to 1974 I attended the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, where I studied with Nathan Lyons and Ralph Gibson, and Empire State College, from which I received a B.A. with a major in photography. In 1974 I returned to New York, where I have continued to work as a photographer, as well as a writer, editor and graphic designer.
My photographs have appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Tribeca Trib, Newsday, the WBAI Folio, Columbia College Today, the Columbia University Record, and various obscure publications both here and abroad. I have taught photography at the University of Rochester and have lectured on various subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Paris at St.-Denis, the University of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, and the Oudaia Center in Rabat, Morocco. My work is in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Columbia University Archives, as well as private collections. It has been featured in a number of group exhibits and solo shows at venues including the Village Green Bookstore in Rochester; J. Prendergast, Amsterdam’s Restaurant, the Interchurch Center, Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Arts & Crafts Beer Parlor in New York City; and the Frame Works Gallery in Bristol, Virginia.
My memoirs and essays have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Palo Alto Review, Columbia College Today, Columbia Magazine, the Tribeca Trib, and other publications. My essay "Ballet School" in the Antioch Review was named a Notable Essay of 2012 in "Best American Essays 2013" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). I have completed a book of memoirs, “She’s Leaving Home.”
I have been a radio producer since 1976, when I joined WBAI-FM in New York. I did interviews, news reporting, announcing and engineering, and some radio dramas best forgotten. From 1978 to 1979 I had a weekly live show, “Closing the Gap Between Postal Rates and Philosophy.” Finding that form too ephemeral, I became an independent producer of my own recorded radio dramas. My work has been broadcast on National Public Radio; WNYC, New York; WBGO, Newark, N.J.; WKCR, New York; WBAI, New York; KCSM, San Mateo, California; and KMPG, Portland, Maine.
For information about my more remunerative activities, see my LinkedIn profile.