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Born in Brooklyn, New York…I had a normal childhood growing up with two older brothers to look after me… My Mother an English teacher, my father was an x-ray technician, and a hobbyist, with a darkroom in our basement Bathroom… I showed an interest, and became the assistant. After moving the prints in the darkroom from developer to fixer, I would watch, as the Black & White Images would slowly appear. I graduated to working the enlarger, and shortly after, I was hooked. I was in my early teens by the time I had started to do my own darkroom work. I still have my first camera, a Kodak Duaflex 127 box camera. I always assumed that everyone had millions of family photos like our family, so it just seemed natural to have a camera around my neck. I also assumed that everyone was as able as I was to take a well composed and candid photo, I was wrong. My early subjects were anybody and anything that would stand still for me. Little league baseball, school plays, and rock & roll bands. By the time I started high school I had become a shutterbug, I had chosen a school that had an advanced program in photography, and found that the photos that received the most attention from my peers were the ones of the contemporary music scene. I would go to the Rock & Roll shows at Madison Square Garden, sneak my cameras in, and work my way as close to the stage as possible to catch a great shot of Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, or who ever else I could get good access to. After the show, I would go right home and develop all my film and start printing B&W glossies all night long. The next day I would go back to the Garden and start selling my photos. I would gossip with people about the performer, run from the police, and collect the money. I remember making Two hundred dollars from the sale of "Who" photos, My pockets were stuffed with dollar bills, and I realized that this was a great way to make a buck, in addition to being a hit with all my friends. I had become a professional photographer. With the money I'd made from my Rock & Roll photos, I bought my first Nikon Camera, with an assortment of lenses…I was moving up in the photo world. In my senior year in High School I discovered a section in the NY Times called "Fashions of the Times, " The women were both beautiful and exotic, the locations, gorgeous. I used this as a textbook in building a portfolio of fashion photographs. With support & prodding from my mother, I entered a contest sponsored by the NY Times. My photo essay titled "Fashions of High School Youth" was a runner up, and I won an award of $500 dollars. Now I was really hooked! Having won a few small photo contests, I was becoming more confident as a photographer, and decided that a career in fashion photography was where my future lay. After graduating college from the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, I began the arduous route of paying my dues as a photo assistant to some of the NY's top photographers. It wasn't as glamorous as I'd hoped, but it was a learning experience that I'll never forget. Long hours, short pay. I had begun building a portfolio of Fashion & Beauty photos that had the makings of a solid career in professional photography. After a few years of assisting a number of different New York City photographers, I figured it was time to move to the next level. On the advice of several other aspiring photographers I packed my cameras and headed to Europe to become a fashion photographer, and to get experience and tear sheets from whatever European magazines I could. I settled in Madrid, Spain because I'd heard it was an excellent proving ground for young foreign photographers. The experience proved to be invaluable…I evolved into a working photographer, with a portfolio of editorial photographs, and experience at working with editors, make-up artists, and stylists, along with exchanging information and resources with other young photographers trying to accomplish similar goals as mine. There were several funny experiences, one of them on my first shoot for "Dunia" (Spanish equivalent of seventeen magazine). The driver of the location van was telling me something in Spanish very quickly while careening through the hills of the Spanish countryside. I didn't understand what he was saying until the passenger door popped open on a sharp turn, and the driver yanked me back in with a big grin on his face. Most important I began to get the respect of a working crew and the experience of directing Beautiful models and working with limited resources in problem solving. The whole experience gave me renewed ambition and self-confidence, and after two years abroad I returned to New York to get my piece of the pie. After a few years of knocking on doors and showing my portfolio to anyone who would look, I began getting some small jobs with a few magazines, but realized that I needed more to sustain my lifestyle, the struggling artist routine was beginning to wear thin. While attending the wedding of a friend, I noticed how hip the photographer was, and found out what studio he was working for, and interviewed with them the following Monday. The last thing in my mind was becoming a wedding photographer. The image of the lifetime hack in the ill fitting, worn tuxedo with the cocktail sauce stain on his lapel did not sit comfortably with me. Since I had no real traditional education in wedding photography, I improvised with my candid nature, my photojournalistic style and most important my sense of Fashionable elegance, and motion. Luckily, my style happened to be very contemporary in the eyes of extremely particular brides to be. After six years of working as a Freelancer for some of New York's most prestigious wedding photography studios, I had begun to develop a good reputation with a number of key people in the industry. Using a mixture of Fashion, Candid, photojournalistic, and traditional wedding photography, I started A Fashionable Event, photography for people who savor candid moments (my wife came up with that one). June 2005
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