Photography has always been apart of my life. Since my high school days of yearbook work and learning from my Dad, I have used this media to express and record places and events of my experiences. For the past several years my efforts with photography have been to record and express the way of life for people of other countries. Most recently this developed into more serious research into spatial qualities and community development as it relates to their environmental context and social structures.

This research has centered on communities in many places around the world, seeking out components that stimulate a heightened sense of dynamics for community vitality. This top is two fold. First is the stimuli that are the influences imported in from other cultures that assist, whether negative or positive, in the evolution of the culture and the related community form. Secondly, there are indigenous components of communities that are rich with life and spatial qualities that are, or need to be durable in the face of pressures seeking to effect a change.

The first part of this photographic and community research is about the various influences that stimulate and change cultures, and then leads to spatial changes from new or modified built forms such as buildings or plazas. Exotic cultural imports such as tractors brought to an Indian village where they have hand tilled for thousand of years. A fast food chain that strives to integrate into a medieval town. Global commercialization and tourism and its influence on the continuing development of community spaces and the manner in which people interact with them.

The other side of this is the durable qualities that have persisted for generations because they grew out of a deep relationship with the place or land. These are the timeless qualities that make communities alive and functioning for thousands of years, unspoiled by the constraints of onerous land use regulations, but fine-tuned with the rhythms of social and cultural relationships. Qualities in the places where we would like to spend our time and that we believe to be essential and timeless; places that inform social response in positive ways, are to be found in our built and natural places as components of new developments or historical works of years past.

Photographic documentation allows me the opportunity to experience places of wonderful qualities. Re-examination of my response to places when juxtaposing them with different conditions such as mosaic or repetitive crafting of the images, helps me to understand the important relationships residents in the community allowing me to be more sensitive to design issues.