A walk along Swift River on Father’s Day 2016

One of the things I enjoy most is traveling through remote areas with my husband and sons. I get great joy from planning unique family vacations to beautiful places on a shoestring. These trips give me a chance to detach from routine and explore new worlds with my camera.

I love living in New England because there are so many beautiful places to visit that are within a short drive from our home in Bedford MA. My husband recently took up fly fishing and I accompanied him on one of his expeditions to the Swift River in Western Massachusetts. The Swift River flows out of the Quabbin Reservoir which provides water to Eastern Massachusetts. The river is “gin clear” and peaceful.

While my husband was fishing I walked along the banks of the river and was stunned by how I could clearly see brook and rainbow trout as they swam by.

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.