I am fluent in two media: writing and photography. A lot of people — particularly in the U.S. and U.K., where anyone who claims to be able do more than one thing is a considered a hot dog (I believe the British equivalent is “naff”) — might see such a statement as delusional. This is certainly the case with most newspaper and magazine editors, who are used to assigning text to writers and photos to photographers (and never the twain shall meet).

And not just American and British ones. The bureaucrat-cum-editor-in-chief of the in-flight magazine of a major Stockholm-based airline (I’ll let you guess which one) reacted to my proposal to do both text and images for a piece with, “Article and photos by Gordon F. Sander? No, that doesn’t sound right.” So I settled for doing the text. After all, a guy has to eat, no matter how many media he happens to be fluent in.

By contrast, in Sweden’s former, less narrow-minded province of Finland, where most of the population is only one or two generations removed from the farm, it is normal for a person to be able to do several things. I have had markedly less difficulty there being accepted as a bicontinental biprofessional, as it were, obtaining dual assignments from Image and many other Finnish publications.

Indeed, as much as Finns appreciate my words (especially when I am writing about Finland!), the Finns have been at the forefront of my decades-long campaign to establish a separate name and reputation for myself as a photographer (as well as one that I can use in tandem with my writing).

Thus, in 1993, I was invited by Tatu Tuohikorpi, the enlightened deputy consul of the Finnish Consulate General in New York City, to mount my first major one man show, incorporating 16 of my best images of Helsinki and Stockholm, at the Finnish Consulate General in New York, to coincide with the publication of a feature travel article about my recent visit to both capitals in GQ — for which the magazine’s somewhat red-faced design editor, who came to the reception, chose to fall back on stock agency photos. Evidently my own images were “too arty.” Right.

Five years later, I mounted my largest show to date, “My America: 1964-1996.” The obverse of the ‘93 Helsinki-Stockholm show, “My America,” which contained 60 of my images of “my” America, was installed in Taidehalli Klubi, the restaurant of Municipal Museum of Helsinki, where the show ran for two months, drawing several thousand viewers, including then Finnish prime minister Paivo Lipponen.

Half of the photos in the show were sold to private collectors in Helsinki and London (where I later moved, and turned my Islington flat into a photo gallery). The remainder were purchased as a separate installation by the Hotel Klaus Kurki, my home-away-from-home in the Finnish capital, where my images of Maine greenhouses and Manhattan skyscrapers can be found on each of the hotel’s nine floors — not to mention both the men’s and women’s saunas. Meanwhile, my photo of famed Finnish designer-filmmaker Stefan Lindfors can be found in the hotel bar. (The same Lindfors who called me a writer-photographer in his recently published catalogue raisonné — thank you, Stefan!)

“My America” was a milestone in my photographic career, elevating my photography to museum status. Such status was recently reaffirmed when Cornell’s Herbert Johnson Museum acquired one of my photos for its permanent collection.

To be sure, and most gratifyingly, my alma mater has proven as enthusiastic about and accepting of my bicontinental/biprofessional status as Suomi. One of the conditions by which I became artist-in-residence at Cornell’s Risley Residential College of the Creative and Performing Arts in 2002 was that I stay active in both the textual and imagistic media.

And so I have. Meanwhile, in November 2002, Cornell’s College of Art, Architecture and Planning honored me by installing a retrospective exhibit of my photos of both sides of the Atlantic at the college’s Hartell Gallery. In May, 2004, I was also honored when the college’s library accepted one of my best-known images, a photo of two cars taken in Ithaca in 1971, and a dipytych of a Manhattan street I shot in 1981, for permanent display on its walls.

The photographs you see here, broken down into the necessarily arbitrary categories of Images of Cornell; New York; Travel Photography; Fashion and Portraiture; The Sixties; and Miscellany should give you some idea of what I can do. (Please note: the images on display are also for sale; for print prices, please write me directly.)

So, to end this hopelessly egomaniacal rodomontade: who do YOU think I am? A writer who takes photographs? Or, as some partisans of my images contend, a photographer who writes?

Forgive me, but I like to think that I am both. And I plead guilty to being a hot dog, too!