MARK EDWARD HARRIS: INTO THE ARCHIVES

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

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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.