About

In the summer of 2007, after living overseas for five years, I landed in the woods of North Georgia. It took me about 30 minutes to fall in love with the Southern Appalachians. I decided to give myself a sabbatical to work on my photography.

I’ve taken photos all my life. But the artistic concept behind Baraka Photos had started on a beach in the United Arab Emirates three years earlier, where I spent hours playing with a small digital camera. I was enthralled with the details and textures of seashells. It healed me from two years of hard work in Afghanistan.

I kept experimenting with digital photography while we lived in Dubai, and afterwards in Bali and Timor-Leste. What I saw, bathed in light, was always an antidote for the strain of work. (To get a snapshot of the journalist-trainer-project manager part of my story, you can download my resume by clicking here.)

Baraka seemed exactly the right name for my photography when I chose it, in 2006 – before I’d even heard of the future U.S. president. Baraka is the root word for “gift” or “blessing” in Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu. Sufi mystics used the word to mean “divine essence.”

I’d learned to get along and even be happy in difficult places by looking for baraka in all situations. With photography, it was easy to find baraka everywhere.

My film negative collection from my first 25 years, 1979-2004, is all scanned into digital form. I mourn the fact that I was not a very good photographer in those years, when I was traveling in China, Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus and the South Pacific, but I am repairing and re-interpreting those images with new digital tools to salvage at least the impressions that I am left with. My straight architectural photos from my travels are housed at the University of Washington’s Cities and Buildings database.

Public interest in Afghanistan has allowed me to give talks, produce a traveling photography exhibit, and raise money for a girls’ school there. You can read  about that and see the photos on the web site Beyond the Mountains.

I teach workshops on digital photography, and visuals are always part of my local journalism projects and my media development work. However, I decided in 2009 that I am not really suited to doing photography as a full-time job. I don’t enjoy commercial photography, and having to make money from photos spoiled the pleasure of it. I make occasional prints upon request.

Instead, I use photos to shed light in two directions: inwardly, on my own unconscious yearnings, and externally, on issues that I know and care about. Photography shows me how they are all connected in that big pool we call the universe, or the mind of God.