They beckon to me from behind glass walls in the dead of night. They lure me with their sexy poses and glamorous attire. They can be bought. They are my “special dates.” In November, 2002, after the death of my mother, I began a new photo project quite by accident. One of Mom’s deathbed requests concerned a wish for my photographic success. Returning from Mom’s memorial, after spreading her ashes on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, I passed through Chicago. With a few hours to kill before catching the Amtrak train back to Denver, I visited one of my old haunts, the photo gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. I viewed an exhibit of street photographs by famous photographers. All of the photos had a bit of a surrealistic look. I said to myself, “I can do that too.” For the preceding few years I had taken a bit of a hiatus from my photographic work. Instead, I studied writing in the Masters program at the University of Colorado’s journalism school. I wanted to learn to communicate with words the things I found impossible to communicate with images. But Mom’s dying words had encouraged me to pursue images again. Wandering the streets of Chicago’s Loop before catching the train, I found myself attracted to images in store windows. For years I have been interested in the phenomena of consumerism. I thought I might find a way to make a visual comment on that. For three years I explored this idea, shooting all of the photos with a small Canon Elph SD10 digital camera that I always carried. I shot them late at night, wherever I happened to be in the world. As with all projects, Special Dates evolved into something quite different than I originally intended. I’m not certain that this is what Mom imagined.

After creating nature photographs for many years in a very classic landscape style it occurred to Hawkins that he might be lying with his camera. There is a long tradition of nature photographers using the medium as a means for drawing attention to important environmental issues. However, as he traveled and photographed natural scenes, often waiting for tourists to clear the scene to get that pristine natural shot, or consciously ignoring the discarded beer cans or chips packages, it struck him that he may be doing a disservice to the environment by depicting scenes in an undisturbed view that is becoming increasingly more difficult to find anywhere. He began photographing natural scenes with a conscious intent to include the artifacts and products of human activity.

The Northwoods of Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Ontario are magical places, ever changing with the seasons and the temperament of the weather. These are just a few from a large catalog of Northwoods images created over a period of thirty years.

In 2006-2009 while living in the Catskills about 100 miles north of New York City, I created these images as documents of my vision of one of America's truly great cities.

At the age of seventeen, on a four-month trip to Bogota, Colombia, as an exchange student, I fell into being a photographer. Given my first camera by my older brother to document my experiences there, I found upon my return that none of my photos looked anything like the fantastic scenes that really opened my eyes for the first time. Showing the world the way I see it became a lifelong pursuit. For forty years I have carried my camera with me nearly every day, in an attempt to document the world as I see it. I have photographed many different subjects. I rely on the magical powers of light to direct me to them. I believe that photography is a way of life, a path to discovery, and good therapy. My photographs are simply the byproduct of having lived a wonderful and eclectic life. My hope is that in my photos you will find a bit of the same joy, wonder, humor, sadness, and thanks that I have felt during a lifetime for which I feel blessed. Photography is my passion, not my occupation. For over thirty years have worked as an archivist, specializing in collections of photos,films, audio, video and digital media. This has been complementary to my photographic pursuits, and has certainly been useful in managing my personal collection of more than sixty thousand photographs amassed over the years. Contacts is an experiment to begin to make sense of this life in photography. It’s been an exercise in returning to the roots of this life, and to organize it according to themes, subjects and genres that have reoccurred over the years. In a literal sense it is a series of contact sheets, a type of catalog of photos familiar to photographers. In a deeper sense it is an attempt to re-establish contacts with past pursuits, in the hope that this will guide me into more interesting future projects. Each panel in Contacts was digitally created, using a design program to recreate the look of film contact sheets as faithfully as possible. The scanned photographs were simply placed into the digitally produced film templates, using Adobe Photoshop to reproduce the original qualities of the images as closely as I could. Each panel is intended to maintain the integrity of the original materials, including a variety of film formats and digital media. The exception is that I placed catalog numbers from my photo database into the templates as unique identifiers for each image. Included here are four panels from the sixteen total that appeared in the first show. I believe that in viewing photographs, in addition to seeing the image of a subject, you should also be able to see something of the human being behind the lens. My favorite photographic quote is from the television show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood: “Children, pictures should show what you feel like inside.”

A resident of Colorado since 1997, with brief periods away for work, I have fallen in love with the colors, shapes and patterns of America's Western landscapes.

In June of 1987 I moved from Madison, Wisconsin, to Chicago to take a job as the photo archivist for a well-known publishing company. Riding the “El” to work every day, getting off at the Daley Plaza and walking a mile down Michigan Avenue during rush hour every morning and evening, I was impressed by the energy of the city. To record the energy I felt, I carried my 35mm Leica in my swinging hand during my walks, loaded with Kodachrome 25 film, and just clicked the shutter constantly as the blur of pedestrians passed by me in every direction. I never really knew what I was capturing, so it was a thrill every day to pick up my developed film from the day before to find out what my camera saw. After two weeks the novelty wore off, but these photos will always be my first impression of living in Chicago.

Cultural landscapes from my extensive travels around the United States.