Lee Bartlett had been teaching in the Dearborn, Michigan School System damn near since it was established. He was a big man on campus and anyone who came to know him either loved him or feared him, usually the former. With one short year to retirement, he strolled the school halls armed with a smile and Speed Graphic. You see, among many other things, Lee Bartlett was the school photographer.

As a first semester junior, I was for the first time selecting some of my own classes, and had been waiting for this moment forever. After running down the list of possible electives, I came across just the class I had been looking for. Now really, just how difficult can this photography thing be? Little did I know. Oh, just how little did I know!

By the first semester of my senior year Lee Bartlett was not only a teacher, but a friend and a mentor. I was taking pictures for the school weekly in-house newspaper, as well as the yearbook. Wednesday afternoons I was earning a small fortune taking wedding photos of couples getting married at city hall. Friday nights were spent ringside at Cobo Arena selling dozens of 8 x l0 photographs of "Big Time Wrestlers" to their over zealous fans.

After a service-connected skydiving accident cut short a career in the Air Force, I applied to the Center for Creative Studies College of Art and Designs Photography Program. Although high school was the place where the magic of photography was first introduced to me, my formal photographic education started in 1985. It was at CCS that the foundation Lee Bartlett had started blossomed. In December 1989, 1 graduated with honors from CCS with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Art/Photography, specializing in medical and scientific imaging.

Since the early 1800's, photography has been a vital means of communication and expression. I believe it is the link between art and science that has drawn me to the medium of photography. In addition, I like working in the dark. The camera, much like a painter's brush, allows me the ability to create and be as intrinsic or as ambiguous as I desire. Peering through the camera's viewfinder and composing is what photography is all about. The subject is irrelevant. It can be straightforward documentation or abstraction.

To take photographs means to recognize simultaneously and, within sometimes a fraction of a second, both the fact itself and the organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's mind, eye, and heart on the same axis.