Photography Atelier

Wandering Along the Horizon

I’m drawn to the infinite, creative possibilities photography offers. I’m also eternally grateful to find myself in the midst of their magical moments – particularly when I’m still, listening carefully, exploring, and looking a little bit longer in order to make a picture. My current body of work is an exploration of constructed color, light, and shadow. Inspired by my background in modern dance, these images are formed with an intention to evoke movement, gesture, and sculptural qualities.

One image gently leads our eyes to another, and another, with graceful transitions and composed shapes. The symmetry, lines, angles, and arcs denote a physical vocabulary of suggested movement. Each image, a vignette leading to transitions and rests, as if I’m back in the rehearsal studios working out movements and phrases, wandering across the floor composing, shaping, and re-shaping dancer’s bodies. I’ve found dance, choreography, and photography have much in common.

Musings

I am a musician at heart who has loved playing the piano since childhood. I also took up playing the guitar to “while away the time” during the prolonged periods of isolation and confinement created by the Pandemic.

Through my love of music and my own personal experiences as a musician, I used both my piano and guitar to help spark new ideas and creativity in my photography. As I embarked on my new mission of discovery, I wanted to explore the places that my instruments would take me. What feelings and insights would I convey through these muses, and more importantly, what would they convey to me?

When I started the project, I mentally reflected on the pieces of music that I was playing and how I could convey a sense of feeling or mood about them. I also tried to represent the musical sounds through a strictly visual medium. As the days passed and I struggled to express my feelings about the Pandemic, I became obsessed with the shapes of my instruments and used their reflective surfaces to help reveal my innermost thoughts in a more abstractual way.

Windows are a common theme in many of my “Musings” photographs. Their shapes conjure up a more cathedral-like atmosphere and impart feelings of isolation, fragility, beauty and reverence. Some of the window reflections even symbolize my dreams of escape. A portal through which I can travel into the outside world. Free to go about my business, free to see family and friends, and free of the virus, uncertainty, and fear.

During this project, it was hard for me not to contemplate how nebulous, fragile, and elusive my personal freedoms had become. I had never lived through such a time and needed an avenue to be able to express my innermost thoughts of despair, as well as my hopes for a brighter future and a quick return to normalcy.

Surface Tensions

I am intrigued by the infinite characteristics of surfaces especially as they represent boundaries. They can be reflective, receptive, malleable, impenetrable, soft, coarse, tense or yielding, metaphorical or literal, even mathematical, transparent or opaque.  Surfaces are also shaped or influenced by other surfaces layered over them.  This project explores the interplay of boundaries and surfaces as an invitation to meditate on relationships between them.

The Space Between

Between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.

                                                                                                —Viktor Frankl

In early 2020 I began mining my photographic archive—searching for connections, deciphering the language I was speaking—trying to identify signals amidst the noise.

As I began to make new work in response, I found myself “mining forward” what I heard from my archive, expanding my syntax.

This selection of images from the past 25 years—fleeting moments, details, landscapes, reflections, and shadows—is my response after existing within my own space, between here and there, a place that gave me the autonomy to find fresh patterns, relationships, and paths forward.

Acting as both stimulus and response, “The Space Between” is an opportunity to see the world anew.

 

Places I Never Lived

The series Places I Never Lived is an exploration of the way that people put their mark on the world. While photographing the facade of each house in a sleuth-like fashion, I fantasize about who lives there and what life is like on the inside. It is not spying or voyeurism. It is about imagining my life in a different place.

At the same time what draws me to these places is the echo of a human presence, even though people themselves are absent. Inevitably, a barrier exists between each house and me. Carefully groomed landscaping or fencing can block my way as completely as can a cluster of trees or untrimmed hedges. This, however, only adds to the seductiveness of the place.  And that only reinforces my questions: Who lives in these houses? And who would I be if I lived there?

The Longing of Silence

With this series, I am exploring some of the feelings of the pandemic: hemmed in with no end in sight, longing for family, for one-on-one contact with friends, for freedom from fear, and for ways I could comfort so many, including children and teenagers, close to me and afar, struggling and losing so much during those long days. After 11 months of quarantining, I reached out for human connection even if obscured by masks or glass impediments. Like many others I wanted to record this dramatic shutdown, so urgent in its deprivations, isolation and danger. Most of these photos are taken from a distance either through windows or from the end of walkways. All draw upon light, some through complex reflections, to capture the unnatural multiple barriers of living in fear of the disease and, in other instances, highlighting parts of the portraits representing glimmers of hope and gratitude needed to endure. The losses are great and our stories similar, but different. But in every case, these days have marked us for the rest of our lives.

 

Quiet

My Inspiration as a photographer comes from trying to notice the unnoticed and to photograph those images. It is when you see not only with your eyes but with your heart and soul that a photograph takes on more meaning than just the image you see.  In this collection, I sought out simple settings with unique perspectives to alter its natural beauty and breathe emotions into the images. I was looking to find the tranquility, quietness and peace that is to be found in the world.

 

Sisters

My images explore relationships between sisters, opening a window into their personal narratives.  Sisters have a unique relationship; they grow up in reference to one another, individuals, but tied by family. Having grown up without sisters of my own, I envy and admire the bond that unites them. I find them fascinating to observe. Photographing sisters together not only provides opportunities to capture the range of their interaction, but puts them at ease in my presence

Looking for a revealing moment in these life-long relationships, I typically offer prompts such as, “think of a secret your sister doesn’t know,” or, “what does being angry at each other look like?” I observe the interaction- a sober look, a sly glance, a teasing gesture – waiting for whatever self-consciousness there might be to dissolve and what I perceive as an honest moment to happen. Usually, the interaction is between the sisters, but occasionally it’s with me, which begs the question of have I inserted myself into the picture?

Even though I take the pictures with a digital camera I want the end result to reflect the intimacy and chemistry that my subjects allow me to witness during each photoshoot.

I print my photographs using ziatype, an alternative, photographic process that produces a three-dimensional quality reminiscent of nineteenth century images. The messy borders, a result of brushing light-sensitive solutions on special, heavy-weight artist paper, broadcast that I had a hand in creating the print beyond capturing the image

My Father’s Story

This project is about my father’s story. In 1940, when he was 15 years old, he escaped German- occupied France to join General de Gaulle’s Free French forces.

Like many of the men of the Greatest Generation, my father spoke sparingly about the details of his war experience. I have put together the photographs and memorabilia that remain. I have had to piece together the narrative, based on family stories, and all too limited historical documentation. What my father conveyed to me was not in the details, but rather in his love and devotion to his country, and his admiration for General de Gaulle and the other members of the Resistance. Like him, they would accept no less than a defiant, liberated and resurgent France.

As I reflect on my father’s experience, I am reminded of what true patriotism and love for one’s country looks like. Now, in my adopted country of the U.S., we face existential threats to our democratic ideals. I pray that we have the resolve to safeguard the values we hold dear.

Barren Riches

Meandering through a New England meadow or forest during the summer, one may be struck by the inherent beauty of the burgeoning trees and their foliage, the light flickering through the leaves reflecting on the ground.

In the winter, the opulence of the summer has dissipated and the relationship of the bereft trees to their environment is revealed. The individual trees can be discovered in isolation. One may note the variation in size and shape, curvature of the branches, height of individual trees, texture and variegation of the bark, and any damage endured over time. The interrelationships of individual tree placement on the terrain and mingling amongst the different species all come to the fore.

During the 16 months of the pandemic in the US, I lived on Martha’s Vineyard, spending most of my cold weather outdoor time exploring various nature reserves and trails. I was awed by the heterogeneous topography of the island with the array of unadorned individual trees, shapes and placement, usually hidden from view, taking center stage in the visual space.