During the period of atomic atmospheric testing, Bob photographed Tower-positioned nuclear detonations and began making high-speed film documentations with Mitchell and Aeriflex cameras. As a technical photographer for a national laboratory, he traveled widely documenting nuclear tests, auroro-borealis experiments, weather analyses, and more. This work is now held by the Atomic Museum in Albuquerque and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Bob and Kay began traveling to Central America in the '50s, to the Mayan ruins, to coral reefs for scuba diving and underwater photography, to Mexico and the Bahamas. After retirement, Bob continued to travel to document destruction of the Earth's rainforests, first to Brazil, later to southeast Asia. Inspired by the murder of the first eco-martyr, Chico Mendez, Bob went to Chico's home state of Acre in far western Brazil, three times to interview and photograph people and places involved in the struggle to establish extractive reserves for rubber tappers. Bob died before completing this labor of love.

Bob's b/w and color photographs are now held by collectors, museums, and archives throughout the country. Kay is donating his entire life's work to charitable organizations for their use in education and documentation, a rich and adventurous heritage. Most recently the Center for World Indigenous Studies has accepted images by Bob from 1959.

Kay Harper 1924-

Kay Harper remembers her father teaching her to draw in pencil at the kitchen table in Baltimore. As a baker, he expressed his creativity in beautifully decorated cakes and pastries; Kay became an assistant to a medical artist and a technical editor at a national nuclear laboratory. Interest in science blossomed after a Fine Arts degree and directed the course of her life. As a college student she was also a member of two Red Cross volunteer corps during WW II, the Arts & Crafts and Motor Corps.

That war-time experience led to a job teaching crafts at the Institute of Living in Hartford and later as assistant to the medical artist at the newly-founded Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque. There she met Bob, and after their marriage they both joined the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, then performing experiments in nuclear testing. Bob was a technical photographer and Kay a Technical editor/writer. During vacations they began traveling to Mexico and Central America, Bob photographing and scuba diving and Kay sketching and writing her journals. In the ‘60s she began lecturing on Mayan art and Archaeology, using Bobs slides; in the '70s, after a China trip, she lectured for The Texas State Library’s Speakers’ Bureau and in New Mexico to many schools and non-governmental groups. She still travels but now keeps logs on postcards and hopes to publish them.

She’s been to 31 countries but loves best northern New Mexico and the century-old adobe home that she and Bob bought in ‘62, halfway between Santa Fe and Los Alamos in the Rio Grande Valley. She continues learning at local colleges and Worcester College, Oxford, but spends a great deal of time finding repositories for a life­time of photographic and written documentations.