Unfurled: The Secret Field Guide to Berkshire Ferns

For those of us who have had the arduous task of dismantling a parents’ house, we know many feelings can arise. But almost lost among various objects collected by my parents over a lifetime, was buried treasure: my father’s Peterson’s Field Guide to Ferns. This well-worn volume contained meticulously pressed fern fronds, some with spores imprinting the pages. His attention to each frond was an act of respect and love. The book reminded me of my childhood explorations in the Berkshires, discovering unknown plants, including ferns, and getting glimpses of mysterious wild animals. Our family was a part of all this, immersed in the natural world.

Each fern frond was fragile, and their spores created ephemeral imprints that could be photographed only once. The slightest movement or breeze scattered the spores so their source was no longer clear. Yet from these spores, a new generation of ferns arises. The ephemeral endures, is resilient, and re-creates itself.

This Fall I followed my father’s footsteps along Berkshire trails and hidden paths. I pressed fern fronds, creating another generation of spore prints in notebooks. In the Spring fiddleheads push up the earth, completing this cycle of life. When attended to closely, the woods continue to yield up its secrets.

Back of House

A faded two-inch scar on my right forearm is a palpable reminder of my own dishwashing, table-waiting, pizza-baking initiation in a congested pub kitchen 50 years ago. The hustle, the laughter, the exhaustion, and the stress, ultimately culminated each night somewhere between the ecstatic pride of a frenetic night of service well executed and a meltdown. I experienced it all. Decades later an eagerness to delve more deeply into the people and work behind the scenes emerged.

Back of House is an exploration of the command center, the “heart” of an eatery. I sandwiched myself between chefs and line cooks, dishwashers and servers, always underfoot yet trying to stay clear of hot dishes and hectic work lanes. I observed the unrelenting pace, the often-constrained space, the occasionally cranky customers, the relationships among staff. Working back of house is a high stakes dance with multiple partners on a petite dance floor. Yet this is where the magic happens. My images invite you to experience an imaginary sensory encounter with your meal and the individuals who work tirelessly to create it before your server presents it to you so pleasingly plated. Will you accept the invitation?

I am immensely grateful to four diverse Boston kitchens that welcomed me to make photographs for this project: Comfort Kitchen in Dorchester, Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown, Hungry Nomads, a Boston-based food truck, and Mei Mei Dumplings in Boston. Their openness and enthusiasm made Back of House a reality.

Alchemical processes elude human understanding, whether in pursuit of turning base elements into gold or producing an elixir of longevity.  In this body  of landscape photographs, I probe the boundary between theory,  conjecture and happy accidents with my camera obscura in search of unknown transformations.

The camera obscura I designed and built is a (barely) portable wooden box with a very simple glass lens.  It generally eschews modern technology.   I place a photographic print inside the camera obscura box and the lens overlays the image from the outside world onto the print.  The result is reminiscent of a composite or double exposure which melds the elements of the two images.  In a mash-up of old and new, I use a digital camera for the final capture of the image created by the camera obscura.  By varying the print inside the box, I can get dramatically different images of the same scene.

After spending the last decade learning the myriad fine points of digital photography and printing, I find the alchemy of my camera obscura process intoxicating.  Predicting the image is impossible.  Even framing the image is challenging as the camera obscura can only be pointed in the general direction.  The photograph must be created to discover what the camera obscura sees.  Details of a landscape can be accentuated or lost.  Dark and light sometimes struggle for dominance.  Much like the philosopher’s stone was believed to turn mercury into gold, in the resultant image it can be difficult to differentiate the physical from the metaphysical.  Photographing the unseen with my camera obscura is an exploration and an adventure and one that has turned familiar landscapes into a transformation of elements.

Urban Color Revealed

In the city color can hide in plain sight.

The images I take as I explore my neighborhood capture a view of the urban environment, without people and without clearly identifiable landmarks.  It’s the everyday infrastructure of Boston that fascinates me; the highway ramps, rail yards, steps and nondescript buildings that are a mundane but essential part of the urban landscape.

Often when I explore a street that I’ve never been down before I capture some of my favorite images.  I look for pops of color, but also for how they are enhanced by light and shadow and by geometry and pattern.  Through my images I have gotten to know new neighborhoods and gained an appreciation for how color transforms our experience of place.

Between Faith and Doubt

Photographs help me unlock the mysteries of the thought processes bubbling under the surface my awareness. Images can have the ability to capture and evoke the unpredictable. They can reveal surprises, new beginnings, new chances, and new narratives that are often hidden from plain view. By stepping back to observe and understand the images I capture or create, I am struck by what I can learn about myself and my life. The many variations in forms, structures, colors, and tones that make up images can be, confusing. Yet on further reflection the characteristics of images represent fragments of memories good and bad, fear arousing, and pleasurable that reside in my unconscious.

Soon I began to realize that seemingly unrelated fragments released through photographs can unite into a coherent narrative, a story that reveals what is active in the unconscious. Photography becomes a way to understand this unconscious, to decipher the working of the unconscious that exposes unseen drivers of thoughts and behaviors.

To further enhance the potential power of images, I incorporate surrealism into my photographs. This helps me free myself from learned, habitual ways of thinking. When appropriate I use infra-red technology using invisible light to help reveal the hidden.

Photography can be empowering especially when struggling to understand why I do what I do. Photography and photographic techniques provide me with a method to better understand and rethink my sense of self.

The Loneliest Road

The Loneliest Road is an ongoing visual narrative exploring my feelings of solitude and sense of self after relocating to the American West. To navigate these emotions, I began driving along U.S. Route 50, nicknamed the Loneliest Road for its long stretches of remote landscape. I started searching for unexpected surprises through unplanned detours – often turning down dirt roads, curious to see where they lead. In these overlooked, forgotten, and disappearing places, I feel a palpable sense of strangeness and wonder. I draw upon this feeling to create images, exploring how I shape, and am shaped by my environment.

When I’m in an unfamiliar place, a part of me feels disoriented, questioning the understanding I once had of myself. This sense is heightened by the vastness here in the West, offering a rare opportunity for self-realization and expression. Using the landscape, found props, and intuitively staged gestures, I create meaning and connection in the midst of vastness and disconnection. With each new image, I am building an ongoing visual narrative, which is constantly evolving and redefining itself in response to each new image. I sequence these images like an ambiguous travelogue, or even a dream, or a memory. There is no beginning or end.

Perfect is not a word

As a kid, I was afraid of the dark. My parents would go on trips, and even with four older siblings our house sometimes felt cavernous and unsettling.

Going through boxes of photos, I can imagine looking at that house from outside. Nice big home. Nice cars. Nice things. Big family. Very religious. High standards.

Arguments. Substances. Lots of money. Then none. Eventually, a divorce. Leaving boxes filled with genuine laughter, tenderness, privilege… but also grief. Though, from the outside, perfect.

This work contrasts my emotional journey into adulthood with photographs taken by my family along the way. By separating figure from background and recomposing fragments of locations, symbols and time periods, the images become imperfect documents of the past, and yet perhaps more truthful about how it felt, and who it made me.

In 2022, I was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was my 3rd cancer in 12 years. This project is about using images to express what I wasn’t able to say at the time. Growing up in a chaotic home, I learned to not notice internal and external disturbances. But Carl Jung said “what we resist persists and what we embrace dissolves”. This project is my way of embracing the trauma around my cancers in the service of their dissolution. Using myself in the images allows me to view these events as if an observer in order to gain clarity.

My two breast cancers,10 years apart, were almost expected given my family history. I had anticipated it much of my adult life so my response was matter fact, almost numb. Even so, many moments seemed surreal. Radioactive juice being injected into my breasts, with a geiger counter protecting the floor. I checked in for radiation at an abandoned desk, scanned in by a barcode reader. Enormous white machines whirling around my exposed body while techs stood behind a 2 foot cement wall.

The possible damage from the radiation terrified me. Like a game of Whack-a-Mole, complications kept popping up. I was furious that the underbelly of the drugs used for treatment was never acknowledged.

The third cancer, my “early and small” colon cancer, came as an enormous shock! No family history there. No long anticipation. The surgery was extremely difficult and my hospital stay anything but healing. I went home at the first possible moment to my condo with friends checking in. Pain, weakness, vomiting, and utter aloneness encapsulated my first days. I longed for more attention and fearful I would fall apart if I received that. I asked for what I could.

I was left with many unanswerable questions about my future and my “golden years”. Is there another cancer lurking inside? Will that be my demise? What does it mean about my past life and the pride I took in being healthy and strong? Who am I now? What I do know is that I hold the intention to embrace and dissolve whatever comes.

In A State

The breeze tickles my neck as the sun dances through the forest. Bright leaves cascade down, creating patterns impossible to predict. As the sun sets, an old barn radiates color so rich, I have to stop. And then the season changes.

In winter, long light sneaks fitfully through the windows, surprising me where it lands. Often there is no light at all and the cold sets in. Living in rural Vermont, it’s a given we talk about the weather. You feel it in your bones. You bring it in on your shoes. The darkness is long and the light is a gift.

In this rural life, I feel connected to the land: it is beautiful and lonely, harsh yet nurturing, constant but ever changing. As the world spins faster, disturbing the quiet landscape and its daily rhythm, I worry about the future and feel nostalgic for the past. Seeking the bright spots puts me at ease. These photographs chronicle my love of place and how I cope with living here.

I combine rural scenes with ones that I have staged to represent my emotional response to being here, now. I often use movement, either through the camera or through the physical body. As a dancer, I relate to Doris Humphrey’s statement: “Nothing so clearly reveals the inner man than movement and gesture… the moment you move, you stand revealed.”  I hope that I stand revealed.

A Play on Dreams

There’s no such thing as photographing a dream. I have tried. 

Within dreams I distinctly remember pointing my camera, but I never remember the image I make. I can’t dredge anything concrete from the fuzzy jumble of dreamed experience when awake.

To me, dreams represent one end of a spectrum that extends from the unconscious process of dreaming into fully wakeful activity. I spent a significant amount of time as a child daydreaming and imagining a fanciful private world. Many of us experience visions that emerge from the subconscious at odd times, or inspirations triggered by a random association. Play is an embodiment of conscious and directed imagination that is too often neglected in our adult lives.

This terrain is the fertile in-between ground from whence comes the material for this series. Attempting to translate these fruits of imagination into photographic images is my form of play. The top of the bedroom dresser becomes a stage on which I assemble a parade of illusory scenes in miniature.

In this world of make-believe, objects can fly, suspended on threads against backdrops of painted paper. As in dreams, nothing is real, and nothing is entirely serious. But the creative choices that make up each image are in fact manifestations of the subconscious. They come from the same mysterious and overlooked inner world that gives birth to dreams.