I am proud to announce that a print of the above image has been included in the Center for Creative Photography’s Qualities of LIGHT Exhibition which opened December 13th and runs through the end of May 2020.
This image is from my Pasadena Police Department Series which is one of my most important bodies of work. I began the series while studying at Arizona State University and exhibited the work at the Northlight Gallery just before I graduated. The ASU faculty arranged for Van Deren Coke, at the time the Director of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Photography Department, to meet with me privately in the gallery to review my work. He compared my images to Larry Clark’s work which will always be one of the highlights of my career as a photographer. Photographing the Pasadena PD eventually led me to chose to a career in law enforcement which allowed me to continue photographing more than most other professions would have. The Pasadena PD series has also had increased interest in recent years and I should be producing a book of this work in the near future.
As for my image above, as stated in the title it was from a search warrant related to rock cocaine sales. For me, I saw the damage first hand that the rock cocaine era in Southern California did in the 1980’s. Pasadena’s Northwest area was ravaged with drive by shootings, property crimes by “baseheads”, and gang activity. So many good people lived in that part of town and they basically had to stay inside at night for their own protection. I knew people I went to grade school with who were killed during this time, like Danny Harris who was shot in a drive by shooting while selling rock cocaine. Then I also saw the harm done to small children like the boy in this photograph, Officers like Naum and Darin cared about the community and worked hard to make it safer by taking people involved in crime off the street. An approach that worked in many ways then which we have abandoned today because of political concerns. Could the approach in the 1980’s have been better? Yes with hindsight things can usually be done better but the over all approach to fighting crime prior to 2000 was better for society than it is being portrayed today. Naum made over 1,000 hand to hand undercover “buys” of narcotics during his career, most all in dangerous situations. Darin, recently retired after a 30 year career. Both these officers cared and put their own safety on the line to protect others. Some people today may wrongly interpret this image as oppression by the means of law enforcement, I know the truth behind it because I was there.
To be included in this exhibition has helped me achieve several long time career goals. I wanted to have my work exhibited at the Center for Creative Photography, arguably the most important photography archive in the world, and eventually have some of my prints added to their permanent collection. Being included in the Qualities of LIGHT exhibition accomplished both goals, with hopefully more to come at the CCP in the years ahead. One other interesting thing I discovered at the opening, for me at least, is this is the first time one of my prints has been in an exhibition with a Garry Winogrand print. (Winogrand is my favorite photographer - I traveled to New York in 1988 to see John Szarkowski’s retrospective of Winogrand at MoMA, to San Francisco to see his entire Women are Beautiful series exhibited at Pier 24 in 2017, and again to San Francisco in 2014 to see the SFMoMA retrospective of Winogrand’s work.)
The Qualities of LIGHT Exhibition documents the history of the LIGHT gallery which existed in New York City between 1971 and 1987. This was a critical time in the development of the medium of photography being accepted as art and LIGHT was one of the first galleries to concentrate solely on exhibiting photography. This exhibition examines LIGHT’s impact on the medium which continues on to this day. One important aspect of the LIGHT gallery was it showcased emerging artists and had work from multiple photographers readily available for view by patrons in flat files. My print was selected, along with other emerging artists’s prints, to document that important part of LIGHT.
For more information about the exhibition please follow this link: The Qualities of LIGHT: The Story of a Pioneering New York City Photogaphy Gallery.
To learn more about the history of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona please click here.
