I was commissioned to shoot a portrait series featuring the nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital accompanied by bio-captions describing the important roles these nurses brought to their respective departments. Having shot at hospitals a lot over the years, I realized my biggest logistical hurdle was going to be coordinating the schedules of the doctors and nurses. So I proposed shooting pseudo-David Hockney photographic collage style. I wanted to shoot this way just in case someone was unable to make the scheduled time for the portrait sitting. This way, I could use another person as a stand-in with a white coat to fill the edge of the frame of the person who was there, come back and re-shoot the person who missed the session, then fix it in post. I was thrilled with how they turned out. It offered both a visually unique styling AND scheduling flexibility for the doctors and nurses. Final prints were 24×38 and set in a white matte with a black frame.

There are some teachers in life you never forget. Dr. Fasinelli was one of those teachers for me. He was a professor at University of Maryland. He taught art, photography and film. He was close friends with Lotte Jacobi. He spoke with a stutter, shuffled one foot as he walked, and had a
degenerative bone disease which caused him to hunch over. The jocks thought Film Classics was an easy credit and would mimic his stutter and laugh at him.

I was a jock, but I saw this man as a gift to those who wanted to learn. After graduating, I had dinner with him before he died. That is when he told me that he flew over 3,000 hours as a bomber/navigator in B-17′s during WWII. He watched Dresden burn and later visited the place after the war.

He never thought being a PhD was important. He didn’t have “Dr.” on his office door like all of the other professors who had that level of education. I learned a bit of everything for him. His film classics are still the bedrock of my visual lexicon.

I thank him every day I shoot…motion or stills. Every time I watch a movie, every art museum I go to, every piece of architecture I look at…I thank him.

I’m always curious to see how children see the world. I’ve found that when you bend down and take pictures of kids at their eye level, you see so much more of their character. This shot is on film. I try and try to get this look with a digital camera and Photoshop, but it’s just not the same. Call me old-fashioned. (Or just old.) Either way, I won’t be giving up my film cameras anytime soon.

If you get closer you’ll see the subtleties of a young face in a whole new way.