I came into this world on the front seat of a ‘65 Buick station wagon.

My mother’s fourth child and ninth pregnancy, I was just about due and my mother, needing a break from my three older sisters, was checking into St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood at the last minute to rest her nerves for a few days. En route driving down Imperial Highway in Watts, she went into labor, raising herself onto her hands as I slid silently, without crying, onto the seat of my parents’ new car. "Drive faster, Wendell—she’s coming out," my mother pleaded with my father. He obliged and suddenly he had company—a police cruiser pulled up alongside their now-speeding car, and the officer began signaling for my father to roll down the window.

"She’s out, Wendell—don’t roll down the window. She’ll catch cold," my frightened mother implored, frantically worried that I, too, was a stillborn birth. She had already had four. She knew that the police car was alongside them, and figured that they were escorting us safely to the hospital. After all, it was one o’clock in the morning. We arrived at the hospital where the chief of police himself awaited my "fugitive" father; I was labeled "unclean" and placed in the room with my mother rather than in the infirmary with the infants that had been born at the hospital. It was only later that my mother found out that the police had not escorted them at all—they had held a shotgun trained on my father the whole time.

I was born less than two months after the Watts riots burned through south Los Angeles in August 1965.

I’ve told this story as long as I can remember; in our family’s lore, it had become a humorous anecdote. But today my sister told me she’s been reflecting on this story, and there’s actually not a damn thing funny about it.

I didn’t become interested in photography until I went to college.

I started to make art as a sophomore in college. I had had no previous interest in it; in fact, I distinctly remember remarking when I was applying to college that I couldn't imagine going and majoring in something utterly useless, like art. I had always liked to make snapshots and I don't remember exactly why, but at the end of my freshman year I decided to take a photography course. You had to be interviewed to take visual arts classes, and me going down for my interview into the basement of the Visual Arts building where the darkrooms were was like Dorothy entering Oz. It was a magical place and I wanted to inhabit it. Because my parents put no pressure on me to major in something practical, I chose to major in photography. I've never regretted that decision.

When I finished grad school, though, I promptly announced my retirement, disillusioned with the financial impracticality of trying to pursue an artistic career, especially because I didn't believe that art should be bought and sold. I thought art is the embodiment of ideas and ideas should be shared freely. Talking to another artist friend during that hiatus, I said that I didn't consider myself an artist anymore, and she said that she believed that if you are truly an artist, you always are, in everything you do, whether or not you are actively engaged in producing "art" objects. She was right, I think -- during the several years when I didn't make any art I was constantly, almost daily thinking about new bodies of work that I might someday make. I make art now only intermittently, and I would have to say that in my experience it isn't a choice to be an artist, and it is an absolute luxury to be able to practice artmaking.