Spawning Run #4 Photograph - Limited Edition of 1

I was born in Vancouver on May 4th, 1947 which puts me squarely in the baby boom generation. For the first 18 years of my life, I divided my time between living in the city and living in the West Kootenays (summers) of British Columbia. This duality of my life enabled me to explore my interests in the arts and sciences from a hands-on perspective.I have been taking photographs, since I was 6 years old. I used my brownie box camera for many years until, on a student tour of Europe at 15, I purchased my first 35 mm camera in Germany, an Exa 2, which offered me exciting new options for capturing images. This was soon replaced by my Nikon F which finally gave me the image sharpness that I was seeking. From 1965 to 1969, I spent the winters in University in the city and the summers in the Provincial Parks as a naturalist where it was part of my duty to photograph nature and present illustrated slide talks to park visitors. This was glorious. I learned so much from nature during this period of close observation with a macro lens. My spiritual guide was Eliott Porter who I believe is one of the most profound photographers of our time. Although Europe was interesting architecturally and historically, it really held little interest for me aesthetically. This was painfully obvious when I lived in the UK for four years from 1969 to 1973 during postgraduate studies in evolutionary biology. Since my initial plan to study butterflies in Sri Lanka did not work out, I had to refocus on a laboratory-based project that could get me results for my thesis. I was just bursting to break out and be in the wilderness. I almost escaped to Ethiopia to study Gelada Baboons in the Semien Mountains, but alas a revolution gripped Ethiopia at this time and I was strongly advised not to go. With my first child on the way, my wife and I moved back to British Columbia. It is this time when the dam of aesthetic repression burst and I explored a cornucopia of imagery, especially in the summers when we moved into various parks where I was working as a naturalist. During this period I was shooting almost all colour. I started to explore the abstraction of imagery at this time. One of the joys of living in Newfoundland (1975-1987) was the close proximity of nature, the incredible landscape and the need to photograph inanimate objects like rock and ice and that didn't move around in the wind during long exposures. I also started using more black and white film and doing my own printing.