Working in both black and white and color, Testa combines a sense of compassion with the keen eye of street photographers like Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand. He has been making photographs since 1962 receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art. He served three tours of duty in Vietnam as a combat photographer stationed on an attack aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf. In 1973 he received a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Later, as Head Photographer for the Field Museum, he taught photography at Columbia College in Chicago and was a consultant at the Chicago House archeological dig in Luxor, Egypt. He recently retired from a career as a crime scene photographer.