Photography has not played, until recently, a large role in my life. I attended Middlebury College where I majored both in philosophy and religion. Upon graduation I decided to pursue a career in professional hockey but quickly decided that intellectual pursuits were more important. I received Rabbinic Ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1982) and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University (1987) in Modern Jewish Philosophy. I taught at The University of Delaware. Vassar College and Brandeis University and have held two Rabbinic posts, the last in Pelham, NY. I am the author of Abraham Heschel's Idea of Revelation (Scholars Press, 1989) and The Eclipse of Humanity; Heschel's critique of heideger (Dele Gruyter, 2016).
A small digital camera for a birthday several years ago awoke an old interest. I quickly moved on from that camera to a digital slr, to a medium format camera and finally to a large format 4x5 camera.
I live in Montreal, where I was born and continue to write and publish articles on modern Jewish theology and philosophy. I now spend a good amount of time peering at upside down reversed images on the ground glass of my camera trying to find images that disclose meanings in the natural and human landscape.
As a theologian, philosopher and photographer I have always been interested in the natural world, its light, form and substance and our human involvement and interaction with these appearances. My photography is largely motivated by the attempt to capture an unrepeatable moment when these elements combine to provoke or signify a meaning that is inescapably human and natural yet cannot be reduced to either of these realms of thought.
I am discomforted by the thought that it is not from experience but from our inability to experience what is given to our mind that we are drawn to God and the beauty and ugliness of our lives. The shallow order that we seek in nature and human arrangement closes off the transcendent in the contingency of all order. With my camera I attempt to open up the allusions to the transcendence of nature and human involvement hoping to challenge the depth of our understanding.