These photographs represent highlights from three bodies of work featured in my forthcoming retrospective, subtitled “50 Years of Photography: No End in Sight.” The book is slated for a 2025 launch, and will be at the printer by the time Center’s reviews roll around. It will be a propitious moment to share my work and book, which culminates with “American Stories.” For in truth, all of my work encapsulates “America,”with a focus on social justice and how American culture, with all of its dreams and inequities, has spread throughout the world.

Growing up in the 60s, the counterculture movement was my movement, and my mature work in this book reflects a strong anti-establishment ethos as a consequence. Perhaps because of its pervasive unrest and idealism, the 60s sensitized me to social justice and a belief that all of us, together, can make a difference. Can images do that? I still don’t know, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

Witness the earliest image (third upload) dated 1969 titled “Helping Hands,” included here. Two injured men are drinking whiskey in front of a closed and barred storefront; one is on crutches, and the other’s hands are useless because they are wrapped in thick bandages. The man on crutches, a good friend for sure, lifts the bottle to the other man’s lips. One man is black, and the other is white, but it doesn’t matter. Race is no obstacle where they are concerned. And beneath the bottle, behind the metal barrier, is a newspaper page that’s been posted on the store window. In effect, a nicely coiffed white woman stares at me, framed by the two men in this drama.

Fifty years later, after numerous twists and turns, this drama is still unfolding: from NYC’s Lower East Side in the 1960s, to Beverly Hills in 2010; from the trauma Canada’s First Nations peoples faced during the 1970s, to North America going up in smoke as gasoline prices spiral in 2022 while TV commentator John Oliver covers his eyes in mortification (on a billboard above a Shell station in LA). It’s an understatement to say that our world and the photographic medium have been shaken to the core over the past 50 years. It feels like two centuries of change, and from the 1960s to the present, it is! I hope my retrospective will do it justice!