In the mid-eighties, after borrowing a friend's camera, I began to use black & white infrared film to chronicle the people and times of New York City. Up until that time I hadn't considered myself an artist in the visual sense having instead been involved in the East Village music scene. I found that the city and its inhabitants made their own compelling landscapes and, like John Ford in Monument Valley, I would let this scenery do most of the work for me. My early black and white images were candid street shots imbued with ethereal highlights and shadows I wanted from the infrared effect in hopes of the work my own signature. In those days, in downtown New York City, anywhere you looked were fascinating looking people just begging to be photographed. It was almost as if I couldn't take a bad picture.

It was about this time that I seriously started to research the history of my new pastime while keeping tabs on the art world markets, Christie's/Sotheby's, media critiques and publishing trends, I couldn't help noticing a curious discrepancy peculiar to the photography medium; black and white work was automatically designated noteworthy and / or serious art, whereas color was dismissed as some Johnny-come-lately bastard child. Vulgar and untrustworthy. Right about then, in '85 or '86 I switched over to color infrared.
To go into the problematics of shooting people in action using infrared would fill a small book, so to be concise, I spent a few years experimenting with filter combinations until I got the one that seemed to work for me. Filter combinations not endorsed by the Kodak book of rules that soon discarded. Then my camera and I took to the streets much as before.

Every once in a while, if you are lucky, someone comes along and tosses a brand new road map in your lap for a brand new direction you hadn't thought possible. I don't remember the name of Nan Goldin's early book of color photos that I picked up in a bookstore, but I couldn't put it down and I wanted to know why. After scanning several times through her volume of intimate, snapshotty color work, I realized that her subjects were all friends and acquaintances. People she knew. Involvement. Right then I knew that I couldn’t rely on the objective approach I had used so far.