I began taking photographs in 1969, using 35 mm still and 16mm motion picture to record student life in college. This early work, confined to black and white imagery, laid the ground work for my approach to the medium, namely as a means for documentation. During the 1970s I began to explore color and shifted to recording the craft and architecture of the American Shakers. Beginning in the early 1980s I became fascinated by the hidden designs in man-made and natural surfaces. Initially conceived simply as “rust,” the project expanded from detailed images of rusted metal captured from construction sites throughout Boston to include various other instances of distressed or altered metal and wooden and stone surfaces wherever I saw them. While the work has shifted dramatically from the photojournalistic work with which I began, I still use the camera as a way of seeing, of recording the embedded but often overlooked or taken-for-granted designs that surround us.