A Photographic Quest for Poetic Imagery

In the summer of 2021, I began a strange journey with my photography.  I had been couped up in my home almost the entire year due to a plague that hit our world.  I needed to break out and explore that world again.  So, I set out on a Photographic Quest on the first day of Summer. In this quest, there were many short journeys in and around my home base. This took me on daytrips with my wife, friends and myself.  This photographic quest sent me off exploring in many directions and adventures.  I wrote a journal of thoughts along the way. This Quest had no specific direction or purpose other than an idea to photograph the concept of poetic imagery.

I produced a photographic body of work to base my idea on. This body of work was both straight forward photography and imaginary images. I needed to make them poetic in nature.  “What the hell is poetry”, I began to ask. I knew nothing about poetry. I started to search out the meaning of what makes a poem poetry. I was surprised at what I found out.  Poetry is not a precise definition. It meant many things to many people. I was again lost in my questions of “what makes a poem poetry

I explored my work in as many possible directions as I could. This led me down incredible paths to explore. I could one day sit at a pond, photograph raindrops on leaves, or a fairy in a garden or a man working hard at shoeing a horse. I explored my church where I spent many hours in as a young adult looking for a faith. Or a Boy Scout camp where I spent days as a scout enjoying life.

This Photographic Quest was a great and wonderful adventure for me. A thistle began to grow in my garden.  One day the light was right, the flower began to ripen, and I began an exploration of this plant. It was wonderful to explore and photograph.  These images are my view of this extraordinary flower.

Here lies my real Quest.

Terrible Love

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. ~William Faulkner

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. ~Martin Luther King Jr.

Laissez les bons temps rouler! ~Cajun saying

I love South Louisiana and my people. It is a terrible love.

My photographs always reference the Deep South––-my roots. My work reflects my sense of pride and frustration about the world I come from, as well as my conflicted feelings about embracing a culture that is as violent and misguided as it is fun-loving and family-oriented.

My project explores the world of South Louisiana, a place of lost dreams, lost opportunities, and nonstop celebrations. It is a place that hasn’t seemed to change much in the past 40 years. My photographs are an attempt to deepen my understanding of its past and present, as well as
my own.

Faces Behind the Food

As human beings, we all must eat to survive. While some of us enjoy good food others struggle to put meals on the table. My wife and I ate at two wonderful restaurants in the Boston area to celebrate our fall birthdays. In both instances, we met the chef at the end of the meal. But what did we know about the people who grow the ingredients these restaurants use? For instance, !Who grew that meaty celeriac?” The answer to the first question is Eva Sommaripa, an 80 year old pioneer who has been supplying New England and New York restaurants with amazing ingredients, beginning with fresh herbs for Julia Child in the 1980s. The next question was, How do they grow those microgreens?” My wife had recently begun a weekly delivery of nutrient dense microgreens, and I was curious about how they were grown. To answer this question, I sought out the woman who delivered our microgreens, Smita Das, who began growing these microgreens for her own use in her basement during the pandemic and quickly discovered a market for them with both consumers and restaurants. And while Eva and Smita donate to their local food pantries, from my younger daughter”s volunteer work at the Greater Boston Food Bank I knew that this organization has worked for years to buy and distribute tens of millions of dollars of food annually to those in need. Thus, the third question became, !What is the scope of GBFB”s efforts?” The images of Juan Encarnacion and Jose Vega provide a glimpse into the scope of what the Greater Boston Food Bank does every day. My intention with these images is to inspire your curiosity about the people and stories behind your own food.

Call for Urgency arose from recollections of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire. I’ve selectively scorched and burnt prints of landscape images through controlled oxidized combustion. Like the current, incremental, and seemingly inevitable path of environmental change, the resulting images are permanently altered. Once printed, any other digital and physical images of the landscapes will be destroyed, leaving only the burnt images as record of what once existed.

The impacts of the Anthropocene are far reaching and will require our action to offset the damage. What form of ‘fire’ will it take to ignite our urgency and galvanize us to take steps to alter our course? The Clean Water Act, catalyzed in part by the river fire, demonstrates our ability to achieve significant improvements if only we act.

My crow series, Murder in Nampa, reflects the magic, mystery, and  otherworldly presence of a local roosting of crows. I represent them as spirits,  messengers, seers, and prophets. They are metaphysical beings possessing a  heightened intelligence and awareness. They observe us. They watch us—and I  watch them.

My artistic intention is to bridge the narrative and the poetic.

My images are transformed into symbolic and metaphoric storylines that  reflect legends, myths, superstitions, folklore, and scientific knowledge. I  attempt to agitate the viewer’s sense of social and cultural norms.

I intend that these enhanced transformations provide a psychological and  philosophical connection to a subliminal reality, a profound ethereal  realization of the universe. The crows warn us of the stresses affecting our  perception of the world as reality dissolves into dissent.

Ta’anit- Fasts

Come on a journey with me to an ancient volume, Masechet Ta’anit*, one of thirty-seven books of the Talmud, the compendium of Jewish Law.  Each day, along with thousands of others, I study one page of this mammoth treasure of law and legends.  The journey lasts more than Seven years.

In Ta’anit the rabbis ponder what a praying community can do to bring needed rains, and how to rid the community of pestilence, danger and plagues.  Included in their arsenal were prayer, fasting, blowing the shofar and miracles.  The question is how to make sense of this complicated book and add a visual component to it?

The Talmud is a winding road, so Ta’anit delves into other topics, such as the Temple in Jerusalem, mourning days of the Jewish calendar, the responsibilities of the priests and the secret good deeds of individuals who help to make the rains come.

For this project I chose one idea to explore for each of the thirty-one pages of the volume. Each image contains a page identifier, a Hebrew term worked into the image and one idea presented on each page of Ta’anit.

Ta’anit conveys messages established centuries ago, but these messages are relevant in this time of drought, floods and plague.

*The Tractate of Fasts

What makes a family?  Love, choice, commitment, patience, comfort, energy, fun, caring, strength, hope, creativity, sharing.  All of these are evident in the routines of daily life.  Families wake, learn, work, play, eat, and rest together.  They create, nurture, laugh and cry together. Over a few months in 2021, as we emerged from the altered reality of late summer and fall pandemic, I photographed the daily life of one family in New York.  I am grateful for their generosity in sharing their ordinary moments.

Fly Over Landscapes questions what happens when our parents are no longer present in our  lives and the new landscapes formed over time and faded memories. Through the grief,  resiliency takes hold, and new life is breathed in, created from the depth of loss and sorrow. A  glimmer of hope leads us forward.

When my father was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, I began an 18-month  journey flying from New York to the Midwest to be by his side during the last days of his life.  Each flight was more heartbreaking than the previous; I consoled myself by photographing  passing landscapes beneath me.

After his passing, alone in my memories, I began to layer the landscapes, using collage and  overpainting techniques, revealing my personal journey of the healing process, and  transforming this traumatic experience into something bearable to live with. This work seeks to  celebrate the beauty and sorrow, the ever-changing landscapes of our closest relationships, and  life itself.