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[At the moment my family and I have relocated to Nairobi, Kenya (!) and I’m excited to be plotting next steps. Stay tuned! - Bill]

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Just trying to live a creative life - photography, music, teaching, organizing, collaborating with others. It all goes together.

Photography

I learned photography in my father’s home darkroom in my late teens. My work is somewhere between art and documentary. I’m probably equally shaped by my early photo heroes like Josef Koudelka, Marc Riboud, and Henri Cartier-Bresson; my years shooting for newspapers and magazines, where I learned to shoot anything and deal with all kinds of people and situations; and my years traveling in Eastern Europe, discovering the world that was hidden while growing up during the Cold War.

These days I consider myself a reformed photojournalist, mainly pursuing my own long-form photo projects. I’ve had a number of exhibitions, awards, workshops, artist talks, overseas residencies, and in 2012 published my book The Waiting Room - Photographs from Belarus which got some nice notice.

In 2015 I was voted DC’s “Best Visual Artist” (cough, I KNOW… but hey I’ll take it) in Washington City Paper’s reader poll. From 2008 to 2023, I taught photography in the art department at Maret School in Washington DC.

Climate-Art

I’m calling myself a climate artist. For me, climate is the number one issue. Art can’t take carbon from the atmosphere, but it has a role to play with helping us believe in the future, and rebooting our relationship with nature/the environment and each other. What should/can that look like?

I’m also publishing a weekly climate-art newsletter at viaductarts.com, a kind of digest exploring how artists of all kinds are approaching the climate crisis.

Music

I’m back to music as well. I always played in bands, now I’m a solo singer-songwriter, whatever that means these days. Yes I sing and write songs for acoustic guitar but I’m interested in ‘future music’ and a variety of influences, not a Preservation Hall of genres.

My first music project, New World Voyage, was produced under the artist alias Místochord. It’s a concept album imagining the first humans to leave Earth forever for Mars (a bad idea in my opinion). The hybrid of songs and photography is a thinly-disguised manifesto to protect our only home.

The ‘meanwhile back on Earth’ followup is a set of songs with a climate change theme, under the working title The Forest and the Trees. I’ve made DIY demos of some of the songs, and they are about half of my live set. I also released a couple of other songs as singles on my Bandcamp page.

You can download my CV for the usual particulars.