My introduction to photography happened when I was about 8 years old. My older brother was enrolled at Columbia College in Chicago, working on a photography degree. To help with his major, our family all pitched in to build a darkroom in our basement. It was too elaborate, it had a walk-through light trap, and just enough counter space for an enlarger and trays to print black and white. He, and later I, used the utility sink across the basement to develop film. Eventually, my brother showed me how he would make and develop prints in that dark room under the orange glow of the safe light. I found the entire process remarkably quiet. Watching the image appear in the trays, seeing an image of myself on the paper appear and knowing he had created that from shutter release to final print struck me as close to magic. I’ve spent the decades since fascinated with the process from start to end.
I bought my first real camera, an Olympus OM-1, after a miserable eighth-grade trip to Washington D.C. with a malfunctioning Kodak Instamatic. I worked a long, hot summer painting overhead doors at my father’s shop to earn it. That transaction — suffering and effort in exchange for the right tool — turned out to be a decent template for how the work actually goes.
My photography career started in 1986, the year I began studying seriously. I was a junior at Valparaiso University, trying to be a business major with very mixed success. That fall, I took an ”Intro to Photography ” class with Professor George Strimbu as a way of keeping my grades up while I worked to find myself. I had no idea how much that class was going to change my life.
The first couple of weeks of class were filled with the basics, f-stops, shutter speeds, and basic shooting stuff. Then we moved into the darkroom to learn the printing process by making photograms. At the end of the second week of class, we had our first assignment to complete over the weekend: look for shapes and light. At Monday’s class, we developed the film. Wednesday’s class, we made the proof sheet from our film. On Friday, we were to select our favorite image from the proof sheet and make a proof print, then show it to George to make sure we were on the right path technically. I made my selection, loaded the enlarger I paper and developed it. I showed the print to George, and he took a long look at it. He showed the image to an older student who was in the room and asked them what they thought. After much discussion about the image, his final question to me was, “Have you ever thought about a career in photography?”. I had some hard thinking, some hard conversations to have, an individualized major to create, and an escape plan from the business school to implement.
It may seem like I’m going on about George and my time at Valpo. But, I think it’s worth taking a moment to explain a bit about him and his background, his teachers, and what that very special education at Valparaiso University meant for me and the following 40 years. George’s photography program was not about photography as much as it was about learning to see and understand the world in which I would be photographing. Shape, light, and our culture. I believe that his philosophy can be directly traced to his education at The Institute of Design in Chicago, László Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus in Chicago, where he learned from teachers like Aaron Siskind, Art Sinsabau, and Harry Callahan. I mentioned earlier that George started us creating photograms as a way of understanding the printing process. The photogram was made popular in the 1920s by artists like László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, who called them Rayograms. What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that George wasn’t just teaching photography. He was passing something forward. A way of seeing that had traveled from the Bauhaus to Chicago to a darkroom in northwest Indiana, and now to me.
The remaining two and a half years at Valparaiso were a whirlwind of activity. Half of my class were in photography, while the other half were enrolled in a wide variety of liberal arts classes. George’s direction was to take classes that I thought would make me a better photographer by understanding the people and culture I was photographing in. So I filled the schedule with classes like critical thinking, urban planning, sociology, psychology, and religion (easy to do at Valpo). With the rest of my time, I worked for the University’s public relations department, Institutional Advancement, and Admissions. I also work for a firm in Chesterton that did work for the steel mills and supporting businesses along the lake, as well as working for the local newspaper in Valparaiso. After graduation, I continued to work part time assisiting in Northwest Indian and taking on my own projects. Assisting work took me into the steel mills along the lake and associated industrial companies.
In 1991, I made the leap and began working full-time in Chicago, assisting established catalog and advertising shooters. I also began developing my own client base in Chicago, creating images for corporate and industrial companies and occasionally working on editorial projects for publications. In 2002, Elise and I added Wehmeier Portraits to what we were building — a boutique studio oriented around the kind of portraiture that families return to over decades, less about the photograph as product and more about the photograph as evidence that these people existed and loved each other at this particular moment in time.
Those two practices, the commercial and the portrait work, are documented at their own addresses. This site is something else.
Chiaroscuro is where I keep the work and thinking that doesn’t fit inside either business. The name comes from the Renaissance technique of working with light and shadow — not just as a photographic metaphor, though it is that, but as a way of describing how I understand most things worth paying attention to: defined by contrast, readable only in relation to what surrounds it.
I still shoot film. I work with an 8×10 Deardorff and make paper negative portraits that require the kind of stillness and intention that digital photography makes optional. I have a darkroom. I find that working slowly with difficult processes teaches me things about the image that faster methods don’t. The Paper Negative Project is an ongoing exploration of what that work reveals.
I also make collage — physical work built from cut magazine imagery, public domain printed materials, and increasingly from the residue of my own photographic archive. It’s a different kind of image-making than photography, less about recording and more about assembling, but it draws from the same set of questions about what images mean and how they accumulate into something larger than their parts.
I’m writing, too. A chapter for an art-therapy-oriented anthology exploring portraiture’s emotional role in the age of AI and smartphones. Essays here on the site about photography’s relationship to memory, craft, and the particular problem of making meaningful work when the tools for making mediocre work have never been cheaper or more available.
That last question — what it means to make something worth making when everything can be made — runs through most of what appears here. I don’t have a settled answer. But I think the asking is the point.
I’m based in Orland Park, Illinois, which is southwest of Chicago. Elise is my partner in the work and in everything else.