Earth is Home II - A World of Color
An exhibit of mostly new work from Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Japan, Italy, Hungary, Mongolia, Croatia, Texas, New Mexico, Yosemite, Placerville, Mono Lake and the Eastern Sierra and California’s Central Coast, where I’ve been living since 2021. All are palladium over pigment prints. A version of this exhibit was on display at the Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento, California between January 7 and February 7, 2026. The exhibit will also be on display at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite between November 8, 2026 and January 9, 2027. The opening reception is February 14 from 1-3 pm. This exhibit is dedicated to Kirk Keeler and Bill Schwab, two fellow travellers who left this beautiful Earth way too soon. I will miss them both forever.
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Home is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in recent years. After 31 years in our last home, in 2021 we pulled up stakes and moved 350 miles from the Sierra Foothills to California’s Central Coast, two miles from the ocean. We moved from the hot summers and cold winters of the foothills to the moderate climate of the Central Coast where it’s never too hot or too cold and wildfires are rare. Everything was unfamiliar at first, but at the same time I knew we had made the right choice. From the beginning, it felt like home.
I’ve had similar experiences in my travels over the last eleven years since I left the corporate world and have been exploring the Earth. Some places I’ve been to repeatedly (nine times to Iceland, three times to Mongolia and countless times to Yosemite) others only once (Japan, Brazil, the Galapagos, Norway, Germany, Croatia). But all these places represent Home to me in their own ways. Travel has greatly enriched my life and my understanding of the people who share the planet with us. I am often humbled by how their life experiences differ from mine. Imagine being a Mongolian nomad living on the steppe where winter temperatures easily get to minus 40. I’ve had a small taste of that. I also stood in the middle of the Gobi Desert on a summer night when there was nothing but starlight and the light from our campfire. That was the first time I experienced stars from horizon to horizon. On several occasions, I have also stood in awe of mother nature watching the aurora borealis dance across the skies in Iceland. Also in Iceland, I witnessed the rare stranding of a pod of pilot whales. We were helpless and could only bear witness to one of Nature’s heart-breaking realities as the whales were in their death throes. I crave experiences like these and attempt to capture them to the best of my abilities as photographs and short films. My dad built my first darkroom when I was 12. In 2021 I built what I expect to be my last darkroom 50 years later. It happens to be located just a few miles from where the likes of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston made iconic photographs at the Oceano Dunes.
But no matter where I’m living, Yosemite will always be my second home. I’ve been photographing and teaching there for 27 years and it never gets old. Each time I drive into the Valley and catch my first glimpse of Half Dome and El Capitan, I take a deep breath and think “It’s so nice to be home…”
