Welcome to NowThenSeeHere.com.  

This site explores my ongoing photographic projects inspired by the places I’ve lived and stories I've encountered.

My passion for photography began in the juncture of science and art nurtured in a darkroom steeped in the tang of sodium thiosulfate and acetic acid. That spark first ignited in the barren, sun-bleached landscapes of West Texas. Over time, travels across the globe broadened that interest while offering chances to document the beautiful, the brutal, and sometimes surreal environments I've called home. Many of those moments are captured here.

Today, I’m drawn to the regal antiquity of monochrome imagery. My work in digital still lifes and pictorialism keeps me aligned with the aesthetic traditions of the photographic masters who came before.

I’m published in Trees and People because clearly, both foliage and humans enjoy my work. I also snagged a first-place award in a worldwide photography competition, which I like to think means at least one judge said, “Yep, he’s the one.”  For four years, I chased fast-moving athletes with a camera as a contract sports photographer. It was fun, but eventually I traded courts and baseline volleys for weeds and whimsy. Those Blooming Weeds—my backyard ode to flora—was exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, Colorado. Gallery 1516 in Omaha, Nebraska also welcomed my work, which was thrilling because honestly, who doesn’t love a good gallery wall?  And yes, I’m humbled to have been named a top 200 finalist in a global Critical Mass competition hosted by Photolucida. That puts me in elite company—roughly the population of a small village and I’ll take it.

I make updates as new projects develop.

If you're here to browse, reflect, or simply wander through the imagery, I’m glad you stopped by.

Now, a subject you might find a bit controversial…

DEI and Photographic Merit

The photography world has become a place where invoking support for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists is treated as both armor and ornament.  DEI statements are a gallery’s way of stepping into a dining room and abruptly saying, “I didn’t poison the food”—a strange preemptive denial, defending a front that’s not under attack.  This assurance speaks louder than the artwork itself.

Regardless of the assurance, inclusion without keen discernment doesn’t elevate photography.  Inclusion reduces photography to a quota, not a craft. Let’s be blunt: DEI in photography is fear dressed up as diplomacy. 

Contemporary photography, with its robust embrace of LGBTQ+, and BIPOC, or simply queer perspectives, often carries the aura of progress. Galleries and websites swell with representation, DEI statements ring out from press releases, and walls fill with drag portraiture and the dull pink and purple glow of inclusive lighting.  But beneath this “inclusion wave,” something critically important is fading: the pursuit of photographic excellence.

Let’s articulate what’s often avoided: “Being LGBTQ+, BIPOC, or queer is not a qualification for creating great photography.” Identity, while perhaps meaningful to some, doesn’t substitute for visual sophistication, formal risk, or conceptual ambition. Increasingly, exhibitions prioritize narrative over nuance, and biography over superior craft. Aesthetics are reduced to clichés. The result: identity photography, once urgent and defiant, now feels like a genre running on low-fuel autopilot.  The repetition is numbing. Subjects that were once bold are now, frankly, ordinary.

Do curators and gallery owners bear responsibility for this fatigue? In their attempts to promote equity, it seems some have allowed identity to eclipse photography itself. It’s not that the photographers lack skill.  It’s that institutions keep asking the same questions and rewarding the same answers. Worse, they have allowed this flattening to persist without offering any vision of where the DEI state is actually headed. What does this future look like? Will representation always mean simply showing up with a rainbow flag, or can it mean showing complexity, contradiction, even discomfort?  No one seems quite sure and that ambiguity appears to have metastasized into a bit of curatorial stagnation.

Who, exactly, are the “underrepresented” photographers in this moment? The term once stood for invisibility in the canon. Now, it’s used so liberally that its meaning is blurred. Is it about access? About acclaim? About the kind of work that gets exhibited or the kind that doesn’t fit the current politically correct mold?  These questions deserve clarity.  Without it, institutions risk using “underrepresented” as deep branding rather than a legitimate step to inquiry.

Let’s refocus on excellence. It’s time to free ourselves from intersectional photography and identity art’s increasingly narrow confines. Representation should not be an excuse to neglect the rigor of excellent craft.  Minor White’s mystical abstractions didn’t wait for cultural permission to be challenging. Robert Mapplethorpe’s polished provocations didn’t simplify queer life to palatable symbolism.  They made work that provoked hard thought and bit even harder. Their legacy is not just who they were, but how they made us look deeply, sometimes uncomfortably, and always differently.

If institutions and their websites really care about representation, they should stop staging mere inclusion and start more rigorous investigation. Let photography be clear.  Let photography be demanding and free of recycled imagery that does little more than signal identity.

The goal is not identity.  The goal is, and should always be, excellence grounded in the simple concept of merit. Only when work is judged by its quality, not its affiliations, can we admire photographers for what they achieve.

What are your thoughts on DEI and Photographic Merit?