REAL FLOWERS AND REAL ART AT WORK
This photography show was 50 years in the making!
As much as photography was born into a changing world, it also served as an agent of that change. It launched innovations in nearly every aspect of modern life, from the way criminals were tried in court to the way museums maintained visual records of artworks and the specimens of science. Photography required a recalibration of proportion, distance, and geographical difference. It changed the way people saw themselves and others. Time itself was now caught and studied, and the concept of then and now was stretched to the moment between the pictured world and the world before photography.
—AT FIRST SIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE SMITHSONIAN
Introduction by Merry A. Foresta, 2003
PHOTOGRAPHY COMES TO AMERICA, THE WORLD, AND ME
To me photography certainly is a powerful tool people use to document the world around them. As the staff of America’s first national museum found out, photography is the perfect tool for documenting the objects that help us tell the stories of America’s people and their history.
The portrait is the most powerful storytelling tool of the photographer.
I’ve always been a portrait photographer. In every job I’ve had I took thousands of portraits of staff, students, yearbook photos and the like. I wasn’t technically ever paid to be a photographer. It’s just something I always did—like all the portraits I created with my own children.
But I see more than just people when I think of portraits. I see the world outside, nature, and the natural and human constructed environments, as objects to be photographed as portraits.
More than anything else, nature, photography, and art go together for me. That’s why my art is so oriented in nature.
“Now it is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”
— Dorothea Lange, Aperture magazine, 1952
A HOPE FOR A FUTURE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ART
In 1976, I was a sophomore in high school taking my second year of Photography class and portraits were the most commons assignment in photography class.
During that year we took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as we began to plan for college. It’s so interesting to look back on those days and wonder what I was thinking at the time.
I do not recall ever having an interest in going to the University of Arizona, University of California-Irvine, or the University of San Diego. I actually have connections to each of those schools and I have so many stories I could tell about each one.
But for now, I want to focus on a couple of things I do know about me from that time.
I’ll start with my expectations of the future based on how I answered questions about my “Intended Majors” and “Career Interests.”
50 years ago, in the middle of the school year, I announced my “Career Interests” as: PHOTOGRAPHY
ART WAS ALWAYS THERE INSIDE
Photography was always more than just something I enjoyed doing. I enjoyed taking all those pictures over the years but I wanted to do something else.
I wanted to make art with it.
When I was 15 years old I told people in colleges, who were reading my test scores, that I wanted to explore my personal interest for a career in Photography.
I had experience because I was 15 years old when my first photograph was published as art in the school newspaper. The cool thing about that piece was that the students wrote the paper and the local Hanford Sentinel published the Meteor inside their regular paper once each week.
I can only share this digital copy of the newsprint paper version from 1976 with the wrinkle at the fold of the page on the right side of the picture.
To me this image stood out because of the composition. It also has elements of drama and suspense which draws me into the photograph. It’s long and narrow which probably means I cropped it in the darkroom while printing or afterward on a paper cutter for mounting.
Typically I don’t do that today with my photographs. The photographs I print are exactly as they were shot in the camera.
I enjoy talking about this picture as a portrait of my cat, Ahab. It definitely has a story. I used to follow him around the yard with my camera and wait for just the right moment to get a good portrait.
We had rolls of film in the camera that gave us 24 or 36 pictures. Once you shot all the film there were no more pictures to take. There was probably only one picture of the moment with these two cats.
In the Meteor version above you can see Ahab under the car about to get into a fight. I had to be quick but I got the portrait shot I was looking for and we scared away his aggressor.
Portraits of my cats and dogs were some of the first portraits I submitted to art shows.
A VOICE FROM 50 YEARS AGO RETURNS
In my 1976 yearbook I found this note from a graduating senior who was in my Photography class. Of course it’s always fun to learn that someone did know the difference between me and one of my brothers. Also, I was proud to know someone thought I would be a good Junior class president.
But the most important comment was that she was “sure I’ll be seeing your pictures in future art shows.”
I’m sure I read this and was very proud of it for a number of years after high school. Maybe even through college. But, when I read this for the first time since then, about a month ago, I had absolutely no recollection of that comment.
And now it’s been 50 years between art shows.
WHAT HAPPENED DURING THOSE 50 YEARS?
“Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing — which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” — Susan Sontag—On Photography, 1980
You could argue that social media, America’s newspapers, magazines, and other print tabloids, ruined photography well before the Internet, digital photography, and selfies, just as Susan Sontag suggested was happening in 1980.
I would argue that photography is ruined for those who allow it to be seen as merely “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.”
I prefer to use the power of images as an antidote to the ruination of society.
My art wants to communicate positive, hopeful, and life affirming ideas.
Today I create portraits by growing food and flowers by hand on an urban farm. I paint the landscape with soil, seeds, plants, and trees that produce flowers.
While I am currently writing a book of the portraits created over the past 50 years, at the same time I am focusing my lens on flowers as I create new portraits.
Today, I use no artificial ingredients and only real human intelligence on my farm and in my art.
My portraits are original, one-of-a-kind photographs, of living objects I helped create, nurture, and thrive. They became part of a community of plants, birds, bees, squirrels, and other animals and bugs and the flowers especially contributed to the health of bee populations and allowed me to harvest fruit!
My pieces are framed by hand at the Noel Flynn Gallery in Roseville, CA. Each photograph printed on archival paper and mounted in museum quality frames and glass.
There is nothing fake about my art.
MY ART AT WORK IN ROSEVILLE, CA (2026 EDITION)
I believe my art has a way of bringing a real and positive experience of nature, beauty, color, light, and shape to anyone who sees it.
In fact, my art is so real the Blue Line Arts gallery in Roseville invited me to show my work at one of their four Art at Work locations. The show went up last week at the Roseville Chamber of Commerce in downtown Roseville, CA.
You can see the art work Monday through Friday 8:30 am - 5:00 pm through May 15th, 2026.
A FLOWER VIDEO FOR YOU!
As further evidence that everything I’m doing is real, done by hand, and located on my urban farm, I am working on a collection of short videos to show off my flowers and farm. These videos will give you a sense of what it’s like at any given time here on the Lakritz Farm. Turn up the volume and listen to the sounds. Of course I deliberately used video with no leaf blowers or lawn mowers in the neighborhood. This does give you a sense of the real world that surrounds me—and my subjects—in the art making process.
Let me know what you think.
NOTE:
Copies of the Hanford Sentinel 1901 - 2004 are available at the California Digital Newspaper Collection at the University of California Riverside. The site is not easy to use but you can find and read copies of the original student run HUHS Meteor.
Thanks for reading!
