Professor Emeritus of Photography at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Eric taught photography and photographic history for 36 years before retiring in 2016. He earned a BA from the University of Oregon in 1971 and an MFA from the University of New Mexico in 1978.

His photographic work has been widely exhibited and is represented in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the GTE Collection, among others.

In 1970, as a 21-year-old undergraduate, he was granted access to the photographic archive of Ernest Bloch by Bloch’s children. Over the following years, he edited and printed from more than 6,000 negatives. Bloch was the only major composer to seriously pursue photography. Eric published “A Composer’s Vision: Photographs by Ernest Bloch” in Aperture magazine in 1972 and a book on Bloch’s photography in 2011. He has given numerous lectures on Bloch’s photography and organized many exhibitions of the prints he produced. Bloch’s archive is now housed at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.