MARK EDWARD HARRIS: INTO THE ARCHIVES

In everyone's career, there are pivotal moments that redirect its trajectory.

I remember mine. Soon after The Merv Griffin Show went off the air in 1986, I left Los Angeles for a four-month trip around Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands to build a documentary and travel photography portfolio. I loved my time working on the television show in Hollywood where I took care of celebrities in the Green Room and then shot the stills when they were on stage, but after three and a half years, it was time to move on. The show ending forced me to do what I needed to do. I believe in the saying coined by Alexander Graham Bell, "When one door closes, another opens." We just have to have the courage to go through one of them without knowing what's on the other side of the threshold.

The images from that trip around the eastern Pacific Rim yielded a portfolio that I could use to pursue the kind of photography I wanted to do and am still doing today. But it would not be for another half a decade that I would come to the realization that I needed to create more focused bodies of work if I wanted to share my visual voice through published books and solo exhibitions.

Examples of this approach can be found in "The Way of the Japanese Bath," which started in 1992, and my photographer portrait and interview series for "Faces of the Twentieth Century: Master Photographers and Their Work," which also began in the early 1990s. My extensive work in Vietnam that began in 1994 (recently featured in Lens Magazine), along with most of the photos presented here, made their way into my general travel photo book, "Wanderlust," as well as numerous magazines and exhibitions. Though the book won some awards and both its 1st and 2nd editions were commercial successes, I feel this umbrella approach is too vague for a book except when it's a retrospective. Even in that case, the work should be presented in a way to give it coherency.