I am very pleased to be presenting for the first time a collection of portraits I’ve made over the last 50 years. I’ve been thinking about doing such a show for a very long time. By now, many of these photographs are old friends, just as so many of these people are very dear to me. These photographs have helped their presence stay with me even long after many are gone.

Like most of us, my photography started with photographs of the people I knew, friends, and family. This continued through my evolution into large-format (4x5) work and my project on the Great Central Valley.

In 1992 when the Leaf digital back (DCB) came along for my Hasselblad, I expanded into studio portraits. I was also delighted with the Leaf DCB bringing me my first experience with RAW files, and the Zone-system-like processing that the Leaf software allowed for. It became an astounding exercise in custom processing in the digital age.

As I was starting my own family, my kids made for often completing subject matter, as did a wide range of friends with my travels lectures from the early 1990s into the 2000s.

For most of my photographic career, it is my landscape work that became known. That was fine with me as so much of what I wanted to accomplish was a communion, understanding, and appreciation of the natural world.

But the people in my life, their faces, the memories of our conversations and love, have always engaged me. I wanted to hold those experiences in my photographs. Portraits were always a part of my work, and stand out now as most of these friends and family are now only memories. These photographs help make those memories real, contextualized in real exchanges and so clearly of my time on this earth.

I have had many of these portraits in mind for decades as what might be gathered together for a portrait show. There are more to be gleaned from the archive, but even with this limited selection, all of the photographic candidates I had overflowed the gallery space.

These 24 black and white prints are all made for this exhibition, printed with pigment inkjet using the ImagePrint RIP on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Pearl paper with the Canon Image Prograf Pro-4000 printer which also lays a gloss overcast over the image area. The photographs are drawn from 35mm, 120mm and 4x5 film, various digital cameras, some black and white, eight of which started out as color files.