Wondrous Water

We learn in school that the human body is 55-60% water. Water is key to life. It’s found all around us every day.

With these photographs I explore the use of water and objects to understand how light, color, patterns, and texture can affect the composition of a photograph in an aqueous environment. My intention for these images is to take conventional objects and create new worlds in water.

I was curious about combing natural elements with soapy water: what visuals would I produce? These abstract images portray basic objects in a experimental fluid setting. Through changing techniques, elements and colors, I hope to create images that engage viewers.

Defining Wealth

As an advocate for the preservation of wild places, I continually struggle to reach a balance between a comfortable and fulfilled lifestyle, and a low impact on our fragile planet.

The young plants that are the subjects of these images have just opened to the world; they are at their most delicate and vulnerable state yet there is great promise and enormous potential. Some will last only a season while others will, with luck, grow for decades and give rise to new generations.

The outsized gold frames symbolize material wealth. Juxtaposed with the delicate vegetation, the gold frames raise the question of what we actually value. As populations around the world continue to grow and the demands we make on the natural world increase, we find ourselves struggling to reach a balance between serving the needs of our species and respecting the needs of so many others. Finding this balance often comes down to a decision about how we define wealth.

Today, most cultures are fixated on the accumulation of wealth and the never-ending acquisition of material goods. We live in artificially controlled environments that separate us from the forces at work in our ecosystem. We are confronted with increasingly compelling evidence of the impending collapse of our fragile planet, yet have become remarkably proficient at convincing ourselves that the next generation will figure it all out.

I hope these images will encourage us all to think about how we define wealth and where the natural world that sustains us fits into that definition.

Collectively Full Circle

Recently, I rediscovered the joy of bicycling, riding where I reside, on the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border. In addition to experiencing mile after mile of magnificent landscapes and the unique charisma of big cities and small towns, I find tremendous enjoyment in speaking with people along my routes, and have developed a profound appreciation of how lucky I am to be able to do this.

My love of bicycling has given me a friendship and camaraderie with cycling community members throughout New England. This was how I met Abby Easterly, an entrepreneur and founder of the QC Bicycle Collective in Manchester, NH.

While it strikes me deeply that economic barriers play a big role in preventing many people from the opportunities I have had in life, when I ride, it really hit home that for many people, a regular thing like a new bicycle is simply out of reach. I began photographing the QC Bicycle Collective which provides refurbished bicycles and educational programs to their community, focusing on children and teenagers in lower income households, not only as a way to tell their story but as a way to remove one of many life obstacles they face.

 

In Louisiana

In Louisiana is a collection of images made while visiting my elderly father for the first time in Lake Charles. The purpose of my trip was to re-establish an emotional connection with my once-estranged father and to capture a sense of place of the community to which my father moved after living most of his 92 years in western New York State.

Driving through southwest Louisiana “sightseeing”, the time in the car allowed me to reconnect with my father, and through the perspective of my photography, to connect with the people and the landscape he now calls home. In subsequent visits, I look forward to creating more images for this personal project and spending more time with my father.

Trajectories (or where I stand)

I am a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico of Cuban parents. My U.S. citizenship is due to my grandfather’s birth in Tampa, FL while my great grandfather was in exile during the Cuban War of Independence (also known as the Spanish American War). This work begins to thread back through generations a family history of migration and exile due to political upheaval. The images represent connections and dislocations in relation to home, family and history.

 

 

 

REFLECTIONS: A Moment in Time

The images reflected on the surface of a building tell us about the surrounding environment, the lighting at that moment, and the surface on which the image is reflected.

With a particular interest in architecture, I am drawn to buildings that are intentionally designed to create a dynamic relationship with their environment. Buildings with reflective surfaces such as glass, polished steel, and copper are constantly changing with the light. I am fascinated by the way the light abstracts the surrounding environment and creates continually changing images.

 It has been a challenge to control the aesthetic qualities of each photograph, and the surprising results are rewarding.

Optical Shards 

We are surrounded by windows that reflect light. There are often reflections inside reflections that we dismiss, don’t acknowledge, or even see. These optical shards disappear with a turn of the head or a step to the right. Familiar, but also worth a second look and consideration.

As I photograph reflections, I muse on feelings I forgot to feel, details I didn’t notice, dreams I can’t quite recall, conversations I don’t understand, and places I miss in my rush through life. Just out of reach, but for me, still worth pursuing.

Dreamed Botany

The growing season in New England can be very short. As a nature photographer, I often visit greenhouses to stay with the green a little bit longer. I thought I would find comfort in the orderly life of the plants living and thriving, kept in orderly rows and beautiful tableaus by the gardeners.

But I found my interest drifting away from the center, towards the edges. This plant that grew between the walls of the greenhouse, that plant that stretched towards the sun, away from the heat of the room, the press of its neighbors. I became fascinated with where the weathered frames of the greenhouse connected with the smooth leaves of the plants. Some days, I didn’t even go inside – what drew me were the light and color of the sun, shining through the greenhouse, a vision of what might be. My end of season visits unveiled a dreaming world within the greenhouse. The plants stretch in unexpected ways, making their own way to the sun. Without words or voices, they make their desires known. I don’t need to know their names to see them yearning for the light, reaching for space, for a breath of fresh air.

The plants of my dreamed botany embody the aesthetic of wabi-sabi. A Japanese philosophy of art, wabi-sabi encompasses the idea that beauty is not perfect or permanent. Change and simplicity are central to this idea. The perfect blooming flower is not as beautiful as the decaying vine. The otherworldliness of the plants is grounded in the scarred glass pane, the peeling wood frame, the rusting metal edge.

Interesting Life of Bubbles

I wondered what the camera would reveal if I made bubbles in a glass container by pouring a stream of water into it.  I am a scientist and engineer and I thought that the water stream would drag air into the bowl and, as it filled, form bubbles in the turbulent water.  I photographed the bubbles from above in a bowl and from the side in a flat sided vase.  I was surprised by the variety of patterns of the bubbles and how the light reflected off them.

Photographed from the side, light trails appeared from the rising bubbles in the turbulent water.  I surrounded the glass containers with lights of different color and used slow shutter speed to capture the trails.  I aimed my camera down at the surface of the water. Bubbles formed, expanded and finally collapsed. I could not help wondering if this is what our universe looks like to some far distant timeless observer.  

I began this photographic adventure by taking my camera and wondering, “what would happen if…” and ended up finding the universe in a bowl of water.  Fascinating, as Spock would say.

Ocean’s Edge

I grew up on a tidal river with brackish water. Against the midwife’s prediction I was born before low tide. As far as I can think back I have always loved the water, and the moment I moved to New England I fell in love with the Atlantic Ocean. And I love photography. All formats and aspects of it.

The photographs displayed here are part of a larger project that reflects my love of water and photography, and embraces the beauty and abundant variety of options that coexist in life, in nature and in photography. They show what the waves have left for me to find on the ocean’s edge. To emphasize their still, mysterious potential I chose the historic Wet Plate Collodion process. The original ‘quarter plates’ were scanned and enlarged for this exhibit.