About Fred

Photo by Steve Roberts

Life is not the one you lived, but rather the one you remember, and how you remember is in the telling.
Gabriel García Márquez

The telling usually starts with a question we ask ourselves. Perhaps one as asked by Bruce Chatwin, “What am I doing here?” Or perhaps the realization felt by Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again.” Something he wrote after having already said, “Look Homeward, Angel.” So the traveler picks up a pen or a camera, buys a train ticket, and sets out to tell the story, a story without an end.
Gulf of Mexico, Redington Beach, Florida. 1964.
(made at age 11)

Where I Come From

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, I spent my early years growing up in my mother’s childhood home with its view of Beaver Lake. In 1965, my mother sold the house and moved me and my siblings to Europe. Most of that time was spent traveling around the continent in a Chevy Bel Air station wagon, perhaps the largest automobile on the Continent at the time. It certainly created excitement whenever we came into a small village in Italy or Spain.


Eventually we settled in Paris where I attended boarding school at Notre-Dame de Boulogne outside of the city. During those years living in Europe, I began to make pictures with my medium format box camera wherever we traveled and in the museums I looked at pictures made by an art history of painters. I walked among the ruins of the ancient Romans and found a world to myself in the woods of Boulogne. My teachers had me read de la Fontaine and Baudelaire. And in the spring of 1968, I was given a lesson in political resistance that I have never forgotten.

Ways of Working

Anyone with the right equipment, technical ability and sense of the pictorial can make high quality photographs of their travels. But, are they interesting? Do they reveal something beneath and beyond the surface? Why exactly has the photographer engaged himself or herself in the place of their choosing? These are questions I consider every time I go to the airport. There are many undiscovered territories awaiting the thoughtful and contemplative photographer. Even if my photographs look like someone else’s or my journey to Angkor Wat is preceded by Kenru Izu, I know that my work must have a substance beyond the ability of the camera to record.
 

Career Highlights

I am an American professor who teaches art history and all things global travel. I live in Siem reap Cambodia seven kilometers from the famed Angkor Wat.

With my first writing and photography published while still a high school student, my career as a photographer, writer, educator and media producer has afforded me opportunities of travel. Never one to wear only one hat, I spent my twenties as a wildlife and fine art photographer. I would go on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history which led to university teaching positions at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and presently at the College of Southern Nevada. In 1999, I assisted CSN in the early development of their Distance Education or online programs. In 2021, I was awarded by the Nevada University system the distinctive award as "Outstanding Professor of Online Learning." As a scholar, I spent ten years as a Subject Expert and led tours around the world while also serving as tour leader for the Smithsonian Institution. I have lectured on topics of art, photography, philosophy and environmentalism.

As an artist, my work has been exhibited and collected widely. Along the way I also produced film documentaries and later worked as a researcher, camera operator and 0n-camera host for television series produced by The Travel Channel, PBS and A&E. In 2009, I formed a media production company, eLearning Media, which I continue to operate as a means of documenting my global travels while creating teaching videos.

Always a writer, I have authored numerous essays for art catalogs, journals and magazines. In 2018, my publisher,  Smallworks Press, released a book of my photographs, Motel Vegas. This book won Third Prize, the Bronze Medal, for Best in Architecture Books for 2021 (out of 5000 nominees). In 2022, Handbook for a Burning Age was published. Co-authored with Will Roger, the essays I contributed to this book explore the role art and artists have historically taken in the protection of nature.

Presently, from from home in Siem Reap, Cambodia, I am writing a book about Angkor Wat and sacred architecture, titled, "Breathing Angkor."