My mom gave me my first camera before I attended the University of Alaska-Fairbanks on a basketball scholarship. It was a small automatic Vivitar point and shoot that took really clear pictures.

I left home at 17 while playing ball at Fullerton Community College, next at the University level as an All-American candidate, finishing the Nation’s 6th leading scorer, NCAA Division II. I majored in Journalism. Ask any athlete and most would have to admit that their sport is an art, much like music, a rhythm that gives the soul expression.

Photography was a natural progression for me without even realizing it. When I played my last game, I dove into what some would call a career for ten years. During that time, I played and worked extremely hard while traveling to wherever the money I had left after rent would take me. Whether it be on a mountain in Kauai, paddling with the Orca in Johnstone Strait, or riding my bike along the Los Angeles River on a sunny day, I needed to take at least some of what I was seeing with me, put it on my walls, stare into it, then imagine where was next.

These images became valued possessions of mine for 11 months of the year; they still are. That Vivitar, all of a sudden, was more than just a camera. After about her 10th birthday, it/she slipped from my hands onto some rocks in Vancouver. She died. I remember thinking, “I still have my vision.”

I stopped one day short of where I was headed, took every dime of a decade’s retirement (of which the Government and California took a nickel), bought three cameras, left my income and benefits, and moved everything I owned from my studio in Long Beach into a 10 X 10 foot room provided by a friend for the next year. While still trying to figure out how to use my new cameras, I traveled to Mexico and Alaska, literally reading the manuals along the way. I was preparing at the time for another one of life’s climaxes, three months traveling overland through Africa, to all the places I’ve read, seen, imagined, and dreamed about. I left in October 1999 to Cape Town, South Africa, moving north east through Lesotho, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Swaziland, and Kenya, returning to Los Angeles in early January 2000 (spent the weeks following at M&M’s and Fatburger). Africa………………Much more than I ever imagined. I had just enough money left to develop my slides from the trip.

Within a year I was teaching 3rd grade in south L.A. All the things that teaching is in Los Angeles, it makes your heart swell, and if you can bear getting that stepped on from time to time, children create an energy you can’t possibly put a price on.

Love and encouragement from family and friends have enabled me to take these photos down from my walls and bring them to show. On the heels of several well received exhibitions in the past few years, this site has provided yet another opportunity to share these images.

Rocco