I’m a photographer because I know how to see, and feel, and communicate, and I feel compelled to do so. I’m addicted to seeing. It’s what I have done for most of my life. Being a photographer is what I desire—it’s what I know. I started taking photographs at around 11 or 12 years old. As a child, seeing the photographic image was magic for me. When I was young, I lived the life of a lonely, isolated queer boy. I was invisible, and alone in high school. All I could do was look out at a middle class Brooklyn world that was happening, but wasn’t mine. I had no friends. Images became friends I could play with and a place to go for refuge. When I went to Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, everything changed. Parsons trained me to become a very sophisticated visual dude.

I came out in the cities and found myself for the first time in my life in intimate visual situations—in rooms with men with and without our clothes on—being able to freely and honestly look at each other as men and experience each other physically. But at that time, there was almost no meaningful recorded imagery of us, or the physical culture and style of who men are, here in my New York City world. I was moved to record it for myself, and for all of us.

When I was an editorial art director in the 70s, I used to think I wanted to design other people’s photographs graphically. Possess them in that way. Then in 1976, it became clear to me that I wanted to take my own images of what I had never freely seen, of who and what I was hungry to see, to record my existence through my individual vision of it.

A combination of masculinity, detail, individuality and human vulnerability catches my eye. Men who are at home within themselves, alive in their ability to share some spark of their humanity with me. Men who have an inner life and an inner light that I recognize within me, within both of us.

I used to talk to people I met while walking down the street. I’ve found models on the subway. I have stood in the middle of the sidewalk with my camera waiting and watching the men who walk into me or walk away from me. Knowing who will respond to me and who won’t. Before the Internet, I placed ads in papers. Right now it’s mostly men I meet casually in my everyday life or online.

I am a portrait photographer. I think I shoot hot/cool, masculine, soulful and honest portraits of men based on what I see as each man’s individual visual strengths and poetry of body and gesture through my design and human vision. I try to make transcendent images of contemporary men.

I like it when someone takes a photograph that goes deeper than the surface. Something with a spark of life that is not a cliché. Strong photographs that truly come from a meaningful and individual place in the photographer, that turn me on and show me something, a way of visually letting me into seeing someone in a way that I haven’t seen before.

I’m a visually articulate person. My memory holds much of the visual history of the second half of the 20th Century. I’ve seen a lot of fine art, art history, painting, illustration, advertising images, anthropological photography, film, history of contemporary photography, posters, graphics, editorial magazine imagery, television, record covers, culture, style, porn, fashion, icons, logos, billboards, postcards, tattoos, typography and street life.

I’m drawn to the work of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Mike Disfarmer, Danny Lyon, WeeGee, Henri Matisse, and of course, Peter Hujar. Their work touches me because they hold on to a beautiful moment in time, the magic of life and love.