In the cross-section of 21st century American Photography, lies a history of popular image making from the previous two centuries. Many households include a box of 35mm slides, drugstore processed keepsakes, and family albums – often subjected to harsh conditions. "Found in Grandma's Attic," might best describe these images.

I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand the impact of photography from the 19th and 20th century, as well as its relevance today – in an era where cellphones take more photographs in an hour than all the images of the previous two centuries combined.

My work is also about the medium and message of photographic methods, interpreted by my 50 years behind a camera's viewfinder.

For me, it all begins with my father, Charles Sr., an engineer and amateur photographer who enjoyed the technical aspects of picture taking - ASA, F-stop, Shutter Speed, Depth-of-Field, and Exposure Guide.

He gave me my first camera, a 1950's Kodak Duaflex II, and later two Leicas.

Without him I wouldn't be an artist.

By 1974 I was photographing seriously with my first Leica M4 and 50mm Summicron.

Artist Stephen Namara befriended me at the University of Missouri - Columbia, where he arrived on a track scholarship from Kenya. I was studying photojournalism and working for the ‘Maneater’ - Mizzou's campus newspaper. I also worked briefly at a small production film studio.

Leading up to 1974, photographic stints found me in two commercial film labs (Werte Color - Bonn, Germany and Neblette Color Labs - Dallas) and formative years as a photographer on the staff of the ‘Shorthorn’ – a daily newspaper for the University of Texas - Arlington.

Future directions for www.ArkansasMomentos.com include re-photographic images of vintage work, and scans of negatives and slides from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Moving to social messages, such as my work The Nexus of Northwest Arkansas, and in The Wheel, I reflect on the generational impacts of migration and relocation. Returning to analog methods such as tintype is similarly embedded in current work.

As I survey the surrounding soil and place where I live, complications in representation occupy my gaze, guided by study as a recent MFA Visual Arts graduate of Lesley Art + Design, the former Boston Arts Institute.

After nearly a decade as a journalist, I returned to academics - studying the History of Photography with Beaumont Newhall.

In Albuquerque from 1980-84, at the University of New Mexico, I also worked as a bio-medical photographer and as a movie projectionist.

"Let me show you my Sword " is a clash of a photojournalistic approach meeting experimental methods. At UNM I had access to expired papers and large-scale chromogenic print lines, producing a portfolio of magenta-shifted images from a Halloween party in 1981.

With a BAFA in the History of Photography, and MFA in Visual Art, I'm intrigued with the photographic process beginning in 1839 – the so-called birth of the photograph.

Pursuing alternative and historical methods of picture taking, I also yield to analogue tools available in digital formats. Reversing time in a modern image, creating 19th century outcomes with 21st century processes, may help us rethink photography from "right now" to "back when." Perfect focus, vivid colors, and three dimensional contrast give way to lens blur, vignetting and dust spots.

Today's tools can also yield yesterday's photographs, and I hope remind us of image making before point and shoot.

My vision for this collection of images is to re-trace my early experiences in photographic labs with my own film photography as a journalist and industrial photographer in the 1970s and 1980s.

If you have been in a darkroom, the luminous glow of a wet 8x10 Extrachrome transparency or a B&W image rising in Dektol - these are almost magical experiences - difficult to recreate in digital methods. And unless you have held an ambrotype on glass or examined a Civil War-era gutta-percha case with a hand-painted tintype, the notion to engage in historical photographic methods in the 21st century may seem like so much folly.