Progressive Street

Call me Kennedy. I am an American - St. Louis born, that baseball and beer-loving city on the mile-wide Mississippi River. Early on I knew I wanted to be a writer because writers were elegantly louche.

As St. Louis bad boy William Burroughs sardonically noted, they lounged around Singapore and Bangkok smoking opium in yellow pongee silk suits. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful servant boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. This was the life for me.

Yet I showed little academic promise in my youth, barely graduated high school and finally emerged from college after prolonging my adolescence for the better part of a decade in the 1970s. Like many aspiring writers, it made sense to work for newspapers. I had a lively interest in the morbid and the abnormal. I also had an appetite for the extreme and the sensational, for the slimy and the unwholesome. I felt at ease among people who were liars, sluts, crooks, morons, cretins, perverts and obsessives.

Over a 20-year period, I worked for small town American newspapers in Montana, New Mexico and Oklahoma - primarily owned by publishers who were either alcoholics or sex addicts. This period of life was what I desperately needed, as I tried to put my misspent youth in the rearview mirror. What I had not counted on is how I fell profoundly in love with photography. And, in that bygone era, this meant constant access to Tri-X film, a definition of heaven superior to any previous ideals.

Labels are a drag - yet if I must adhere to a frame of reference for some context, I’ll go with photojournalist - which is inclusive of both documentary and street photography, and allows visuals to compliment and reinforce written discourse. My days in photojournalism ended over 20 years ago. In fact, I put my cameras away for a decade and had no further connection with my former world.

Yet - true love is what it is, and now I have returned home like Odysseus to find Penelope still waiting for me. That’s a little overly dramatic, because my Canon F-1 from 1976 is now a bookend, and my mainstay system is the Nikon D5300. Yet a Penelope is a Penelope is a Penelope (right, Gertrude?). The truth is I’m still susceptible to falling in love, and lately I’ve been having a grand time with the Ricoh GR II. Call me a fanboy. I’m delightfully shocked by how lightweight and stealth the camera is for street photography. And yet the gear doesn’t change my motivation. I have no profound explanation for why I do what I do … for why I have this addiction to use a camera to document people on the street doing what they do … “some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives, don't know how it all got started, I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.”

To say more would “pluck out the heart of my mystery.” Yet the entire experience is a dazzling reminder of a genuine connection to this human tapestry, full of stories both common and unique, stories full of hope and heartbreak, stories full of solace and souls too soon forgotten, from the streets of Barcelona-to-the streets of Varanasi. Have camera, will travel.

“ As a street photographer, I’m not interested in a contrived reality. My interest is authenticity. I also did not bother with permission to photograph anyone among the alleged 1.7 million demonstrators in the recent Pro-Democracy rally in Hong Kong.

If this is a problem, would you kindly contact the leaders of all governments and ask that all CCTV cameras be dismantled and destroyed at once. We have become enslaved by our own technology, and everyone is on camera everywhere every day.”

Group Exhibitions

Street of Seoul

a genuine connection to this human tapestry, full of stories both common and unique

stories full of hope and heartbreak, stories full of solace and souls too soon forgotten

Street of Seoul 2018

a world of colors

New York in black and white

Street of Seoul