Greetings!

I am a freelance photographer, author, and art educator whose primary work focuses on art, indigeneity and the environment. The landscape of the American West and the relationship people have with it figures largely in all of my work. Community and Communication are also primary themes. All of my work involves the continuum of human expression.

Another form of introduction might be - Born in Montana. Raised in Salt Lake City. No, I'm not.

My mother's people are from Montana via Kansas then Texas. They were part of one of the last big cattle drives from Texas and they stayed at the end of the trail. On her "Heinz 57" side I'm related to Dutch colonist Peter Stuyvesant and author Albert Payson Terhune. My father's people are from Czechoslovakia. Hucko is Slovakian with Polish undertones. (The original pronunciation is something like "hooch-caw" or "hooch-koh".) The meaning of the word is not exact but the word (hoo-chee) in the Slovak language means the sound made by running water or waterfall. This was so great to find out as I have an affinity for photographing water in the desert and I love to run the rapids of some of our western rivers. My father's parents fled the Russian invasion of 1908, were stowaways on a boat that came to America where they met and lived the rest of their lives in New Jersey. (Yep! I'm another Bruce from Jersey, right there with Springsteen!)

I graduated from the University of Utah with a BS in Business Management, former Eagle Scout, raised Lutheran, but .............

My photographic work has published in national landscape related calendars and books. Fifteen books feature my work exclusively and I've contributed to more than a dozen others. My media credits include National Park Service interpretive slide shows for Arches National Park and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. I produced and was primary photographer for the 40-minute, 8-projector multi-media show The Canyon's Edge, produced for Canyonlands Field Institute in Moab with Tom Till and Terry Tempest Williams. I've also produced slide shows for Southern Utah Wilderness Association and the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.

My time now is devoted to personal photography work with occasional work. I also serve as the print manager for the Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. I make the archival pigments prints for galleries and museums and oversee the consignment of his prints for consignment and publication. Nickolas photographed 4 American presidents and the who's who of Hollywood, Literature, Art and Politics in the 1920s, 30's and 40s. His photographs of Frida Kahlo are the most famous of her.

For over 40 years, ending in fall, 2023, I was known as Art Coach in various schools in Utah and New Mexico.

From 1978 until 1989, I lived on the Utah Strip of the Navajo Reservation where I served as classroom teacher and artist-in-education. That period began an involvement with Indian people that continues to this day. Premier among that work was the exhibit "Have You Ever Seen a Rainbow at Night? The Art Of Navajo Children." That work has been released in book form as A Rainbow at Night (44-pages, Chronicle Books, 1997). I was recognized in 1984 by the Rockefeller Bros. Fund as one of 30 leading art educators in the United States and received a Rockefeller Bros. Fund Award for Excellence in Arts Education.

After a decade among the Navajo I moved to New Mexico and worked with Pueblo communities. "Where There Is No Name For Art: The Art of Tewa Pueblo Children" (120 pages, School of American Research Press, 1997) is the result of that relationship. For that book, I received a 1998 Southwest Book Award and the 1997 Carey McWilliams Award given by Multicultural Review Magazine as "the best book of the year on the U.S. experience of cultural diversity."

In 2000, I moved back to southern Utah, settling in Moab, where I own the home where I'll spend the rest of my days. I free-lanced and joined up with buddy Jack Loeffler to create Voices of Youth (VOY), an audio/radio and photography project that trains youth in the art and craft of aesthetic documentary work. Using B&W photography and digital radio media, tee-aged participants explore community-oriented subjects from a folklore or life-ways perspective. First created for the Western Folklife Center in Elko, NV, I introduced VOY to the Moab high school where it ran 5 years and received regional and national attention.

For 15 years, up until the end of 2023, I was Art Coach! at HMK Elementary School. That's a job that brought me great happiness. Among the wonderful work I did there was teaming up with Friends of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks (Joette Langianese, director) to create "Look Where We Live," a local landscape, geography, history and painting project that feature plein air painting for 3rd and 4th graders at Island in the Sky and Arches NP. You can find that work on my page at blurb.com. For my HMK work, I was named the 2015-2016 Elementary Art Educator of the Year by the Utah Arts Education Association and the 2018 Outstanding Elementary Visual Arts Educator by the Sorenson Legacy Award Foundation who partners with the Utah State Office of Education to bring arts education to Utah elementary schools.

I love integrating with and learning from different media and art forms. I have done (or am doing) projects with poets, archaeologists, creative modern dancers, writers, sculptors, painters........... and children. Children and the land have been my primary inspiration for years and I truly see little or no line between my personal photography and teaching art. Children have taught me to play with the concepts followed stringently by others and to not take anything too seriously. From my literary friends I think of symbolism, metaphor and "getting the lines right." Dancers and the Navajo language have expanded my understanding of how to incorporate movement in a still frame.

My initial passion was for landscape photography. Since high school I wanted to have (and now have had) photographs published and sold by the National Parks. Moving to the Navajo Reservation in 1978 set free some thoughts on the relationship between people and place. They are forever entwined in my way of thinking, one influences the other, and I take as much pride and interest in my work with people as I do with the land. While I engage in what is often called fine art and commercial photography, I tend to think of myself as a blue-collar photographer. I get the job done whether for a client or myself. I wake up thinking "Life! Great!" and sometimes find a way to express the joy of it through a photograph. At other times it's expressed by hiking, rafting or just washing dishes! The making of a photograph is like having a good conversation with a new or old lasting friend. Whether the subject is rock, tree or human, the process is the same. The photographer, subject, materials, equipment all contribute to create a mutually realized idea. I view photography as a life practice, a way of being. Active seeing is not something I turn on and do only when holding a camera; it's part of the art of living.