I was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1949. Following college and graduate school in the late 1960’s, my early explorations included poetry, filmmaking, photography and painting.  I arrived at a hybrid practice that both synthesizes my previous efforts and anticipated the revolution of digitally manipulated imagery. Combining photographic imagery with words, collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking into a multi-dimensional visual language, my current work has evolved into a personal visual poetry.

The advent of digital technology allowed me to print without the limitations of wet chemical processes and led to a period of fertile experimentation with photographic Iris printing on different papers and substrates. I was especially interested in the solubility of Iris inks and their ability to transfer, which can be seen in works such as Sylvia Blue and Sylvia Pink, front and back cover of Children of Adam from Leaves of Grass published in 2001.

In 1997, I began the Ink Series in response to the Cambodian genocide. The series includes four bodies of work: Inks/Tuol Sleng, Inks/Man/Woman, Inks/Models, and Inks/Christ. In this work, drawing and painting with ink became increasingly integrated with collage and montage, and that approach continued to shape my practice moving forward into the most recent catalogue, Paul Cava / Collages, Montages and Photographs, published in 2020.

Since the pandemic I have primarily worked with straight photography with the exception of Wood Works, sculptural collages made during the pandemic at the same time as Corona Interiors, still life photographs made on my kitchen counter in 2022/2023, exhibited at Cindi Ettinger Studio with an accompanying catalogue. Most recently, in 2025,  I made a body of work depicting fallen leaves on antique silk.