When I was six years old, my mother gave me a camera for Christmas. It was a red box Kodak. She had a camera and liked taking pictures so she thought I would, too.

The first roll of film…I didn’t know nothing about it! When I came to the end of the roll, I just took it out of the camera, exposed it to the light and tried to develop it in a saucer of water. My mother told me that you had to take the film to the store to get it developed. She took it for me to a hardware store named Blake’s on North Clinton Avenue. When I was at Mercer County Community College, I learned to develop my own film. I was taking a course in communications then, and I was very interested in movies.

I liked movies even when I was in grade school but not the kind of movies that most kids liked. I loved the photography in foreign films, especially one film by Frederico Fellini called La Strada. The photography was like a painting, a live painting in black and white. Fellini and Truffaut made films about childhood from what they saw around them. I try to do that, too.

I think my style is impressionistic. I try to capture emotions. I want my pictures to help people bring back their own memories and feelings