By nature I'm inclined to alchemy, whether mixing pigments with sensitizer in the photo lab, making herbal medicines, or preparing food in the kitchen. Mixing, stirring and altering matter. Creating something from something else. I don't think there's a higher purpose in life than to create.

My Dad was an amateur photographer. Fairly active when I was a young boy, he used a small 4' x 6' black and white darkroom that his father had made for him.

I got to watch and sometimes even help process film. In my private time, I'd slip into the darkroom and pretend it was a spaceship--a room in black, sliding door, fans, red lights, orange lights. I learned early on that anything can be visualized in a darkroom. Those memories--sensory and emotional--remain clear and strong more than 50 years later.

Photography still maintains its magic for me today. Watching a silver print develop in the tray brings chills just like it did 25 years ago when I bought my first camera and started making prints on the floor of a laundry room closet. There, kneeling next to the dryer, my future wife's roommate taught me the fundamentals of black and white printing and processing. Soon after, I was shooting for others for money, and before I knew it, I was a working freelance photojournalist.

In my twenties, my creative work was mostly writing poetry and short stories, primarily for myself, and more politically and socially oriented writing for my job. By the time I bought my first camera, a Canon AE-1 Program, I was ready to expand what I was doing with writing to include images as well.

From the beginning, my goal as a photojournalist was to reveal truth. I knew images had to be more than truthful for people to want to look at them, but seeking truth was my first interest in making them. I took a workshop with Susan Meisalis, the documentary photographer who had become a war photographer in the 1980s. Her documentary work in Nicaragua became known when the U.S.'s role supporting the Contras in Central America during the Reagan administration drew media attention. I also took a workshop with Earl Dotter, the old labor photographer, who was right out of the Lewis Hine tradition. He advocated for uncovering corporate malfeasance regardless of the consequences to one's personal welfare. Both of these teachers wrestled with truth and beauty in their work and they helped me understand the photographic issues better as I took my first steps into the world of photography.

Alongside the images, I wrote of these true things. And I imagined I would write and photograph in this way for the rest of my days. My wife was a working journalist when I met her. Shortly after our wedding, we took off for Africa. Our backpacks were filled with sound recording and photo equipment, books, journals, food and barely enough room to squeeze in clothes. We spent nearly a year writing stories and photographing throughout North and West Africa and came back with a lifetime's memory of adventure, wonder and discovery. My life as a photographer was rolling.

But a good life is nothing but change acted on with purpose. I became a householder in my thirties and forties. Wife, family, jobs--creation on slow cook. After our first child was born, I consciously removed the international photojournalist hat I'd been wearing. Just like that I didn't want to be away doing work that was inherently dangerous when I could be home celebrating the life of our child.

In 1987 I took a job as the photographer on a regional news magazine for a few years until it folded. I also worked freelance for some of my old contacts, like Time Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. I started shooting local theatre, and expanded my skills and equipment to branch into commercial and fashion photography. But I didn't really like the commercial work. Good pay but too many compromises.

It was about then that I discovered the world of alternative photography. I wanted to produce something better than the hackneyed theatre shots seen in all newspapers alongside a written review of the show. I was looking for a way to tell a metaphorical story in one image. Self-taught, I'd never had the pleasure of taking a photo history course. But we were living down the street from Duke University in Durham, NC and its good neighbor policy allowed me use of the university library. Duke has an excellent collection of beautifully printed photography books -- both current and top quality originals, and reproductions of early works. I visited every chance I could get. I became entranced with the nineteenth century world of variety in printmaking. I'd been shooting and printing with silver, never knowing there were alternatives to the everyday black and white print. Within a year I'd made cyanotype, VanDyke, Liquid Light, albumen and gum bichromate prints.

It was all very exciting but other issues were brewing in my life as well. I was worried about the direction America seemed to be moving in. I spent a good deal of time photographing on the streets, including city life here in North Carolina and in New York -- people, billboards, graffiti and so on. That work became a one man show called "States of America."

As the Persian Gulf War moved into high gear, I witnessed and recorded a new generation of war propaganda and an emerging American nationalism that bothered my democratic sensibilities. Walking through cities and towns -- commercial, industrial and residential neighborhoods -- taught me a lot about two things. One was the stark difference both in appearance and behavior between people and places of poverty and wealth, and the other was the limitations of photography to have much direct impact.

Looking for impact, I ended up teaching middle and high school throughout my forties. I would have liked to teach photography from the beginning, but there were no photography positions available, so I taught social studies to 7th graders. The curriculum was Africa and Asia and my first-hand experience as a photojournalist in Africa helped bring history and culture to life. I even took two "field trips" with my students -- some of whom had never been out of the county, let alone on an airplane -- to Ghana, West Africa. One outcome of the second study tour was a photo exhibit by my seventh grade students and myself at the Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, NC.

I did end up teaching photography full-time at the Durham School of the Arts. But eventually, I decided to devote my full energies to print-making again, which is why I built the Woods Edge studio in 2002.

The alchemists implore practitioners of the art to "do their work with true imagination, not a fanciful one." I think they mean to approach their work with clarity of mind and to carry always the sense of higher purpose that any act of creation deserves. For me, brushing sensitizer and pigment onto artist's paper and making images that hold truth and beauty is one way I manifest the energy of creation in my life.

--- Alan Dehmer