Photographer & anthropologist
I was born into an Air Force family and raised across the United States, Spain, and Bolivia — an upbringing that placed me inside other people's countries from an early age, learning to read them before I could fully explain what I was seeing. As a boy in the late 1960s, I made two journeys into the Yungas, the steep cloud-forest valleys northeast of La Paz, in years when that country was living through history I was too young to understand. That early immersion led me, eventually, to study anthropology at CSU, Chico, and it still shapes how I approach travel, observation, and storytelling. The habit of paying close attention to a place and the people in it is, in the end, the same habit that makes a photograph.
I returned to Bolivia as an adult and stayed for a decade, most of it in La Paz. In those years I came to know the country at ground level — across the high deserts of the Altiplano, into remote Amazonian river systems, through Incan sites, and out onto the Isla del Sol. With close friends in La Paz's high-altitude medical community, I traveled to the remote village of Chipaya to study human adaptation to extreme altitude. It was there, by chance, that I met Sebastiana — the woman Jorge Ruiz had made the subject of his landmark 1953 documentary, and whose filmmaker had become, in his last years, a friend of mine. She and I stayed in touch until her death a few years ago. Bolivia is also where I met my wife, Ximena, and where our two sons were born; we were married at the Jesuit mission church in Concepción, and Karla's family remains in Santa Cruz, where I return most often now. These are not the connections of a visiting photographer. They are the long, ordinary ties of a life partly lived there.
That understanding is the foundation of how I work. I build expeditions around access, flexibility, and the recognition that conditions — environmental and otherwise — rarely follow a fixed plan. The most valuable thing I can offer is not a polished itinerary but the judgment to know where to be, when, and in what light, and the patience to wait for the moment a place is willing to give. These are not luxury tours; they are working journeys into demanding landscapes, structured for people who value time in the field over rigid schedules.
I think of the people who come along less as clients than as fellow travelers. Much of what we encounter, I'm still discovering myself — the expeditions are not a finished product I deliver but a shared undertaking, and some of the best moments are the ones none of us saw coming. Now based outside Washington, D.C., I lead these small-group journeys into the places that have held my attention for a lifetime: remote river corridors, high-altitude deserts, and the ordinary life of the towns we pass through.
When I'm not traveling, I cook, write and put long miles on a BMW GS when the roads allow. The rest of my time belongs to my wife, Ximena; our sons, Matteo and Nicolas, both studying physics at the University of Toronto; and our English Shepherd, Suki.