I was born in 1950, just two years after my family immigrated to the United States from Syria. I grew up in the small uphill community of Woodstock, Vermont, starting photography at an early age. By the age of sixteen I had learned the overall outline of what it meant to be a photographer.
I studied art history, photography, and physics at Dartmouth College (1968-1972), with time in a Master’s program at MIT under Minor White. After completing my formal education I tried a period as an art photographer, selling prints to collections and individuals and doing individual projects (such as documenting the birth of Pilobolus). My breakthrough was receiving a Reynolds Fellowship in 1975 which supported time in Paris documenting the work of film director Joseph Losey. On returning to the United States, I had a year-long job as a CETA administrator/photographer for the Vermont Council on the Arts and immediately afterwards began developing a professional career. In 1981 I founded a Vermont-based communications and advertising firm (Intermedia) with my wife, Beth Adams, a graphic designer. My photographic work for Intermedia was primarily advertising and corporate-based “journalism” (annual reports). In the mid 1990’s, as the character of assignments changed due to stock agencies, work-for-hire agreements, and later the internet, I transitioned more to solving reprographic problems for clients, with my photographic work returning to more personal journalistic/artistic themes. We moved to Montreal in 2005 where we continue living and working.
My main interests as a photographer throughout my career have been portraiture, street photography, and documentary pictures of social change.