While a graduate student of photography in 1984 at The Rhode Island School of Design, I began teaching in alternative settings. At the time, I was doing documentary photography in nursing homes and then inspired by Kenneth Koch’s taught poetry in nursing homes. The result was my teaching photography, where I was photographing and volunteering. That experience was the beginning of a long ongoing process of teaching and doing collaborative service learning in community-based situations. During that period, R.I.S.D. also awarded me graduate assistantships running their department gallery and teaching my own photography courses. That experience began my professional teaching. Since then, I have continuously made my living teaching in undergraduate and graduate-level programs. I became a full-time professor at Marlboro College in 1997, where I taught until becoming Emeriti status in May of 2020.

I have taught at a large variety of schools, including; Harvard, Princeton, R.I.S.D., The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Greenfield Community College, University of Connecticut, and more, as well as in a number of non-traditional settings, for example, in nursing homes, community-based programs, and orphanages in Cambodia, among others. My position at Marlboro College was part-time for the first seven years while I developed the photography program. In order to make a living, the part-time status required me to work at a number of other part-time and temporary full-time positions. One of the benefits of this teaching diversity has been the breadth of educational models to which I have been exposed to. I have taught students ranging from first graders to nursing home residents in programs and schools of virtually all sizes and structures. I grew to prefer my teaching in schools to be within small liberal arts schools, which have strong art departments and an influence upon individual and alternative studies that emphasize service learning.

Teaching photography in nursing homes while also creating my own imagery there was formative to my belief in community-based learning as an excellent methodology for artists and academics to share through the creative process. I continue to place energy into exploring the means of my own work and or my teaching to work in tandem with the community. At this time, the language I regularly think of is by asking myself how I can be a better ally.

The most fundamental criteria for teaching are having a love of education and a belief in critical thinking. A teacher’s purpose is to inspire and motivate students while guiding them to learn to be their own driving force. At the point where students have finished their formal education, they ought to have the excitement and knowledge needed so that they can and will continue to produce a work of evolving purpose.

The discipline of fine art photography requires consideration of a fine blend of technical and expressive concerns. As an artist and a teacher, I am constantly developing varieties of means by which I can execute this blend, thus expanding the potential communicative powers of the work of my students and myself. I teach techniques ranging from throughout the medium’s history. Always incorporating the critical theoretical aspects of the imagery when discussing it. Far too often, we hear it said that it is the content or the technique of an image or series which actually has value. When in reality, it is the combination of the content and technique with the presentation which causes the work to be what it is.

I structure my classroom as a place for supportive constructive criticism in order to persuade the students to progress forward continually. I believe in positively offering the students as many varieties of opportunities as possible. As educators, we must offer them a reason to learn and achieve, as well as the reassurance that they are capable of learning.

The world in which we live is one that relates more and more through the use of visual images as a means of contemporary communication. Photography is a means for expression, not an end in itself, and we should teach it as such. Frederick Sommer once said, “It is not subject matter, but a subject that matters.” I do not instruct specific social or political ideologies but encourage my students to clarify and defend their beliefs. While clearly inspiring appreciation for the formal and aesthetic value, I invite my students to consider the value and meaning of the images they produce.

I have found fine art photography to be an excellent tool for visual language, which can be utilized in the process as well as the end product. In addition to my teaching experience, I also co-founded The In-Sight Photography Project, a non-profit program in 1992, offering free photography courses to area residents, ages eleven to eighteen, regardless of ability to pay. This program still operates, offering classes year-round. The program regularly has created collaborative teaching for many community organizations, including; a psychiatric facility, a homeless shelter, low-income housing projects, a women’s crisis center, the local hospice, area schools, and after-school programs. The courses are taught by local photographers and advanced students. In turn, the student-teacher volunteers learn about their own photographic abilities while instructing younger students and the younger participants are often awestruck with inspiration by working with mentors who may be only a few years older than they are.

In 2004, I co-founded The Exposures Cross-Cultural Youth Arts Program with Erin Barnard and Scott Browning. That first year five of my advanced college students joined me in bringing youth from the South Bronx in New York City, Vermont, and the Navajo Nation to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to share photography and life stories for three weeks with youth from the Oglala Lakota Tribe. Each year until the covid pandemic, the program returned with its volunteer staff and collaborated with a number of schools and community organizations on the reservation.

In the early nineteen nineties, I was also a founding member of the advisory board and a printer for the internationally traveling exhibit “El Salvador, In The Eye Of The Beholder”. The show, curated by Katie Lyle, documented the twelve-year war between the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, FMLN, and the U.S.-backed government. The images came from an archive of over 80,000 negatives smuggled out of El Salvador to Nicaragua. After helping raise the funds to print the exhibit, I went to Managua to assist in the printing. The educative and historical show consisted of one hundred and twenty-five images and accompanying text. After opening the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, it went on to Toronto, Spain, The Houston FotoFest, and more. During the celebrations acknowledging the peace agreement, the exhibit opened in San Salvador, El Salvador, where it was well received by members of various political persuasions. Photography courses, which I have taught include; a wide range of photography techniques but always incorporate in assignments and conversations regarding conceptual ideas and visual content, including Photo I, II, III, Color, Advanced Critique, Antique and Alternate Processes, Documentary Photography, Advanced Printing Techniques, Zone System and View Camera Techniques, Photographic Methods from 19th to 21st Century, Constructed Realities, Photography & The Book, Photo and Text, More Than One A visual Narrative,
The Complete Digital Workflow, Studio Lighting, and Community Engagement. My colleagues and I also alternate teaching an advanced critique course for visual art students working in all mediums. I’ve co-taught a humanities course on The History of Photography & The Social Reform Movement in the United States.

In 2008 I designed a course and co-taught it with my friend and colleague Cathy Osman, as part of Collaborative Service Learning with Creative Arts, which had an emphasis on Cambodia. The ten students and two faculty studied non-profits, volunteerism, service learning, collaborative service learning, and Cambodian culture and history. We then traveled together to Cambodia and spent three weeks doing collaborative service learning work with a children’s hospital, an orphanage, a small village school, and a non-profit arts program. We followed this trip up with five more, continuing our ongoing work with the Khmer Children’s Education Organization.

I have also led or co-led academic trips with students to Cuba, China, Cambodia, Japan, and the Navajo and Oglala Lakota Sovereign Nations. I truly enjoy leading such trips but find them most rewarding when I can incorporate the learning into coursework before and after the travel experience.

At all times, my consideration is towards how I/we can be better allies to each other while appreciating cultural diversity.