Every old oak has a story to tell. “In South Louisiana, live oaks are history, heritage, and heirlooms rolled into one. They were shade and shelter for early settlers’ homes. They marked where the old property lines met and where back roads crossed. They lined the entry roads to the most lavish plantation homes and shaded the first highways. Each one has a story to tell of the people and events they have witnessed in their long lives.” I have photographed the Louisiana landscape for more than 30 years. Through my camera’s lens, I explore the quiet presence, or “spirit of place” revealed in the changing moods of light on the land. This is seen most clearly in my ongoing series of images and writings of and about Southern live oak trees (Quercus virginiana). My detailed, black-and-white, and hand-colored photographs of live oaks, sensitively capture the trees’ character and essence. I describe my images as "tree portraits." They portray the oaks elegantly, revealing the mystical as well as the majestic qualities of these elder trees of the Louisiana landscape. My work is represented in five books: Heartwood, Meditations on Southern Oaks, published by Bulfinch / Little Brown Press in 1998; Heartwood, Further Meditations on Oaks, published in 2008 by the 100 Oaks Press, and Across Golden Hills – Meditations on California Oaks in 2013, also by 100 Oaks Press; Laura Plantation – Images and Impressions, commissioned in 2019 by The Zoe Company; Quercus Louisiana – The Splendid Live Oaks of Louisiana, published in 2019 by 100 Oaks Press; and Oak Alley Plantation – A Portrait of a Southern Icon, commissioned by Mayhew Enterprises, Inc. also in 2019. My oak tree images have been used as illustrations on book jacket designs for publishers Scribner/Simon & Schuster, Crown Books, Random House, Harper Collins, and Bulfinch/Little, Brown & Co. One of my live oak prints played a significant role in the 1999 Alfre Woodard film “The Wishing Tree.” My photographs are contained in a variety of private and corporate collections across the country as well as the public collections of the Louisiana Folklife Museum, the Louisiana State Museum, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2016, I received a major grant from the Louisiana Department of Tourism to document and create a self-guided tour of the live oaks along Bayou Lafourche.