Sojourner to Stoner: The Photographs

About the Book

“Sojourner to Stoner: The Photographs “is my impression of Southeast Asia in the 1970s. I spent over a year as an officer in the U.S. Army in South Korea and close to two years traveling throughout Asia, first as a backpacker and later as a Hippie (yippee-ki-yay). “The Photographs” are a companion piece to my written book, called with great imagination: “Sojourner to Stoner: The Journal” I have documented a time, the 1970s, before the all-pervading Western culture (sex, drugs, and rock and roll) and The Economic Miracle changed Asia irrevocably. The book portrays the lives of ordinary people and their unique cultures, religions and traditional ways of life. The Asia of Conrad and Maughan is gone, and the war-torn Asia of Vietnam will also pass. This is my time-capsule vision of Asia, a bright shining light from a galaxy far far away that has already disappeared.

About the Author

I am a first generation American, born of immigrant Norwegian and Swiss parents. I was the first in my family to attend college (Lafayette College) and a second-generation soldier (my father served in the U.S. Army during World War II). I grew up in the 1960s, the High Noon of the American Empire and see myself as a child of both Woodstock and Vietnam. The patriotic idealism of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy years dissipated in the societal division and carnage of a senseless war. Yet my generation believed that everything was possible, we could remake America to be that visionary “Shining City on the Hill “our forefathers had envisioned. It is this optimism that inspired my book. It is also my photographic “Bildungsroman”, a young man trying to understand the world and himself. I have an insatiable sense of curiosity and wonder about the world and this Zeitgeist is what I strive to convey in my photographs.