The pictures in this portfolio were taken after my departure as a full-time photography gallery director. For me the experience of encountering foreign people in an intimate and unobtrusive way offered a needed change from the close-up portraits of street people I had been working on. With new-felt freedom, I sought to put people back into a social context, a setting that spoke of a more universal space and time. These pictures engender that lost spirit of exploration; that is, the itinerant photographer who acts as interpreter of the subtleties of casual human behavior. This is a tradition observed by the great 19th century men of letters from Goethe to Twain, through the recounting of their "grand tour." It was a spirit immediately borrowed by such trailblazing photographers as Jackson and Frith, and it inhabits such frank and humanistic contemporaries as Brassai and William Klein.

I aspired to no high-flung "academic" or "artistic" idea with these photographs. I didn't have the need to execute one rigidly conceived theme through countless images. It was exciting to capture honesty in a photograph using whatever seemed appropriate to the place and circumstance. Since I found the circumstances abroad to be more provocative, I began travelling with the express intent to photograph. (I still cannot imagine travelling only to sightsee along familiar routes.) I chose places that, like the Latin countries, are warm and soothing to my soul and where the weather promotes diverse activity on the streets. Italians especially seem to conduct most of their business outdoors from making love to eating. The light in these arenas is also particularly sensual and no more so than when it is enveloping the beauty of the local inhabitants. Photography is the most apt medium for awakening one's senses to the tactile pleasures of life. It is a voyeuristic medium, and I, like any other serious photographer, must admit to a degree of that indulgence. But, photography is, after all, a rather harmless vehicle for documenting what might otherwise be left unrecorded. If taking someone's picture seems a ruthless intrusion, it's legitimized by a finished product that permits perpetual recollection and, hopefully, attests to the beauty or drama of that moment.

As the catalyst of many such moments, I must be prepared for the consequences of my method. That is really what the selections in this portfolio chronicle and what, in fact, my canon as a photographer is all about: cataloguing the evanescent reactions of my quarry which accounts for the entire span of my relationship with each subject. You will see that what I was concerned with was the pursuit of evocative surfaces and the sensations those surfaces render for the camera