- a short bio -

Houston, Texas, September 9, 1970. My grand entrance. Number two of an eventual four for Lee and Linda. Dad was in graduate school at Rice studying chemistry. Apparently every two years of school, Mom and Dad felt there was just a little something missing.

Burned out with corporate chemistry at DuPont, Dad discovered teaching was his calling and landed that first teaching job at Brewer State Community College in Fayette, Alabama. Fayette, pronounced “Fet” by the locals, was very small and very rural. There was a military tank on the playground of our elementary school, a barn in our backyard, and a pasture nearby filled with circus cows. How did we know they were from the circus? Well, they did this neat trick, where the cow with horns would climb up on the back of the cows without horns and sort of dance around for a little while. Fet was educational on many levels. In the self-proclaimed heart of Dixie, Alabama is hot. Rain forest hot. So the Albritton boys dressed accordingly--in short pants for school. As it turned out, we were the only ones in the entire town that wore shorts. For everyone else, it was nothing but jeans year-round. We were taunted by the other kids who would sing the Nair commercial jingle “We wear short-shorts. We wear short-shorts” at us. It was my first realization that the Albrittons were a little bit left of mainstream. At the time, I just thought everyone in the town was nuts for sweating their butts off in jeans all summer just because everyone else did.

Dad eventually got a job at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Much to Mom’s delight, we left the circus cows, our barn, and the sweaty townspeople of Fet behind for bigger and better things. We moved into the house my parents had bought as newlyweds and started up a new school year in a brand new school. We made new friends with kids who also knew the benefits of short pants in the summer. Nobody taunted us with the Nair commercial. A few years later, we moved to a bigger house on a lake which was a kid’s paradise--ducks to torment, fish to catch, and plenty of mud for throwing at one another. All this early moving around seems to have had an impact on me, as I have moved every few years for my whole life.

Summers were spent building bike ramps in the backyard, hunting snakes (and running from them when we actually found one), and swimming everyday on the swim team at Southern Grass Lawn and Tennis Club, where I would eventually get my first job teaching swim lessons. Our new elementary school, University Place, would play a huge role in all of our lives. Mom eventually taught there and almost single-handedly transformed it into the first public Montessori school in Tuscaloosa. My brothers and I all attended school there, and in a bizarre turn of events, I eventually worked a stint as the PE coach at old University Place. It was also at UPMS that I was first exposed to music. A string quartet played at an assembly and I had found my calling. I was to be a musician. I started piano lessons later that year.

I guess it was in junior high school that I began to experiment with hairstyles. Something about that experience in Fet with the jeans and the Nair commercial left me unsatisfied with whatever fashion conventions were reasonable at the time. I would shower, dump a handful of mousse in my hair, and blow-dry it upside down. The pictures are just plain embarrassing. I know for a fact they will come back to haunt me someday in some public venue. We are a close family, but boy, do we love to give one another a hard time. In eighth grade, a bottle or two of Sun-In turned my hair a bizarre nuclear-waste orange color not to be found occurring naturally in nature. I was so pleased. Then there was the parachute jacket--red with many black zippers. It was in style for about fifteen minutes. Yes, there was even a foot-long rat-tail. I must have single-handedly kept my parents in a good mood for five years as I emerged for breakfast with ever more creative fashion statements. To their credit, they supported every spiked hairdo, every bandana (and there were lots), and each mismatched shoe. Ahh, the eighties.

Following my dream to become a musician, in high school I began to play in various bands. The BCs, The Kickbacks, and of course Ham and Eggs. I switched from piano to guitar, the guitar being much cooler, and even tried to sing a bit. My dream of being a famous musician culminated with Han and Eggs’ world tour. We played Tuscaloosa, Gadsten, and Narashino-city, Japan. The three members of Ham and Eggs were chosen as part of a student delegation to Tuscaloosa’s sister-city in Japan. As part of the program along with the choir and barbershop quartet, Ham and Eggs rocked the house. The final concert still ranks as one of the greatest experiences in my life. I was able to live my dream, and boy did it feel good! I even threw my guitar pick out into the crowd!

If life has its peaks and valleys, senior year was a definite valley. Junior year, a Dutch exchange student, Mark Arts came to live with us. Mark became like a brother. Mark and I, along with our good friend Matthew Merrit became a tight-knit wrecking crew. Whether it was getting liquored-up and breaking in to swimming pools for night dips or skipping school to go to the beach or just hanging out bored in Tuscaloosa, life was an adventure with those two. The summer before senior year, Mark went back to Holland and Matthew committed suicide. Matthew’s death was the very first permanent thing I had experienced and the loss was indescribable. I still feel it everyday. It was a difficult senior year.

The summer saw my first big trip--nine weeks in Europe. A friend and I went to visit Mark and see the old continent. I traded in my Kodak Disc camera for a Canon AE1 SLR and my life as a photographer was born. My life as a traveler was also born. I reveled in the experience of discovering the millions of different ways other people live life. I remember having a huge epiphany looking out the train window as the small towns of Spain rolled by. I remember thinking that every village was filled with houses that were all filled with people, each of whom had their own individual hopes, cares, and concerns--their own individual worldview that was completely different than mine. My brain exploded on the train that day and I still haven’t recovered. Through making pictures, I was able to isolate and connect to the smaller parts of the whole overwhelming experience. At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure why I loved making pictures so much, I only knew that I wanted to keep making more and more.

The University of California at Santa Cruz. The fighting banana slugs. Co-ed dorms, written evaluations, redwood trees, and the Pacific Ocean right there. I needed a change of scenery from Tuscaloosa, and boy did I get it. I had been in the state for less than a month when the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 hit. I was in my dorm room and at first thought the folks upstairs were having sex. Earthquake was the last thing on my mind-- that is until my roommate started screaming “Earthquake” at the top of his lungs. It really felt like the whole dorm was going to come crashing down around me. All I could think of to do was to run over to my shelves and keep my stereo from falling. One of the strangest experiences I have ever had was standing on dirt and grass and feeling a large aftershock move the earth. Very strange. I discovered mountain biking and triathlons, as well as many other things Santa Cruz had to offer. . . I shaved my legs down for biking and swimming and had a bit of a moment when I realized that my girlfriend had the hairy legs in our relationship. I was a long way from Fet. A very long way. I finished with a degree in biology, but with a couple of photo classes under my belt.

Not having planned for any kind of a job after college, I spent a year working in a camera shop, then joined the JET program to teach English in Japan. I ended up once again in Narashino-city, a town still recovering from the Ham and Eggs concert way back in ‘88. I taught English in the seven junior high schools in Narashino. Always thinking ahead, I got off the plane in Tokyo knowing only how to say “Domo Arigato”(thank you very much) in Japanese taught to me by Styx’s song ‘Mr. Robato’. Pretty sad. The language was a constant struggle as was the culinary offerings. In Japan, I ate raw just about any animal you can think of, including horse, ram, whale, and pretty much every part of every animal in the ocean. In Korea, I even ate a fish while it was still alive. With the strong Yen and plenty of time off, I was able to satisfy my itchy feet with trips to other countries around Asia. Constantly surrounded by good friends, an exotic, bizarre, and puzzling culture, and many travel opportunities it was definitely a supa-happi-fun-timu kind of reality. I even managed to fall in love over in Japan. I continued to photograph, but realize now that I missed many incredible opportunities for pictures in Japan. I was just a bit too confused about photography and life in general at the time to take full advantage. I’ll be back though.

Upon my return to America, in a failed pursuit of the aforementioned relationship, I landed at home in Tuscaloosa. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn my lesson about planning ahead for jobs and eventually took a job working at my alma mater University Place Montessori School. I became Coach Albritton. While a coach, I got my first wedding proposal (she was 3), got in touch with the stern side of my personality, and discovered the worst thing a preschooler can say -- “Coach, I just poo-pooed my pants”. It was a messy job. UPMS was zoned for the projects, which was an eye-opening experience. To see kids with so many strikes against them at such an early age was frustrating to say the least. I felt very good knowing I had a positive impact on 420 kids everyday (some of the kids who spent lots of time in my time-out circles might disagree with that!). When I told the regional director of PE programming that I was leaving to study photography, she told me I was missing my calling. Her words have definitely made me question my motives with photography.

During this time at home, wanting to learn more about photography, I audited a class at the University of Alabama with photo professor Gay Burke. Gay exposed me to photographers outside the Geographic tradition, and changed the way I viewed photography. I began to think about pictures in a more metaphoric manner. I had some super images from my travels in Asia, but few of them transcended their surface-level depiction of place. Mostly, the Asia pictures were trying really hard to be Geographic images instead of being my images. Slowly, my understanding of photography expanded.

Trips during his time included a month in Bolivia visiting my brother Pressly in the Peace Corps. In Bolivia we stumbled upon a bizarre cleansing ritual with a young girl, two older women, eight eggs, three fires, and two rabbits. We ended up rescuing the one surviving rabbit and my brother kept it as a pet. I also spent a summer with my older brother, William, on Maui. I was working as a wedding photographer’s assistant, but also helped out at my brother’s dive shop. William and I were sent to Midway Island for three weeks to discover new dive sites for the dive company he was working for. Mostly what we discovered was that the waters around Midway were infested with sharks--Reef sharks, Galapagos sharks, even Tiger sharks. After making an emergency ascent due to 10 or 12 sharks molesting us, I was ready to leave Midway. After the shark incident, William, too, decided that maybe graduate school wasn’t such a bad idea after all. The images from the Bolivia trip became my first solo exhibition at the new art gallery at Shelton State Community College, where I was teaching evening courses in photography.

The job at Shelton finally gave me career goals. I decided an MFA was necessary so that I could teach at the college level. Applications went out to eight schools and eventually landed me at the University of Texas at Austin. UT gave me three years of questioning everything I was doing, but also uninterrupted time to think about photography and making pictures. I eventually emerged with a few battle scars, but still very excited about photography.

The Maine Photographic Workshops took me in as a TA for the summer after graduate school. The timing of the experience could not have been better. After three years and a pile of school loans, it was a chance to discover that it really was worth it--that I had learned a great deal about photography and about myself. I felt confident in my approach to photography and loved the chance to share it. I was able to meet some of my heroes in photography and meet new photographers whose work I was previously unaware of.

The Maine Photographic The staff at the workshops is quite a collection of creative, fun, and interesting people, as is the collection of TAs, instructors, and lab folks.

Less than a week after my last day in Maine, I showed up for work at Northern Kentucky University where I now teach photo one, photo two, documentary, and color photography. So there you have it folks--my life in a nutshell. If you are interested in finding out more of my approach to photography and growth as a photographer, read my MFA thesis, which is posted under the link ‘reasons why’.