Photography Atelier

La Familia

As an Italian-American I have learned that the family is the most important aspect of life and that family should always come first. Throughout my photographs I explore the love, support and tradition my own Sicilian family has taught me. The images exhibited are from different family holidays and gatherings over the year and demonstrate the ways in which we celebrate. My motivation for this series is to represent the positive effect spending time with one’s family can have on them. Coming from a big family there are many different, big personalities, but the dynamic is what makes the gatherings interesting. We are all diverse and we learn from each other, one minute we fight, the next minute we get coffee, we stick together and grow as a unit.

This body of work is dedicated to my family because as I grow older I realize how lucky I am to have this constant support system to fall back on. I realize that some people have not had the ability to grow up how I have so my work is to encourage others to reach out to that family member they have not talked to in years, or to try to make time to spend with one’s family, because for me at least, in the end, the family is all that matters.

 

The Spoken Word

Each photograph in the Spoken Word project is meant to be a visual open mike, an individual reflection of the poetry community in the Boston area. This is an exceptional community of people in part due to its diversity and the sincere respect they have for each other, all of which translates into an undeniable strength.

The Boston poetry community comes together at least three to four times a week to listen and support each other through their spoken word art, a mix of poetry and performance, and sometimes song. People are not at all hesitant to personally address topics normally avoided by society at large, saying what they mean and meaning what they say.

The project is a direct collaboration with Boston area poets and spoken word artists. My approach to this series of environmental portraits is developed together with the subject based on the poet’s work and their personal style of expression. The prints are then finished with a fragment of their work or an entire poem handwritten directly onto the photograph creating an individual testament to our collaboration.

Every time I work with a new person, I find that I’m a new person as a result. It never gets old.

After Hours

Perhaps it is my age but I long for many of the elements of our past. When we give up our small downtown business districts we lose the local shops, their proprietors and a venue to maintain connections with our neighbors. Big Box Retail and On-Line shopping is no substitute for more personal commerce. Our central business districts were a center of community life and activity. When people lived downtown there was a different vitality of entire town. As the lights went in the stores each they came on in the apartments above. Today, so many of those units remain vacant. Even after restaurants and pubs closed there were always signs of life.

Today, across the country, small town central business districts are failing. They are an endangered species. Small downtowns thrive in tourist destinations, where outside money flows in during the High Season and survive for the benefit of The Townies. Off season inhabitants are so much more interesting and colorful. They are the town. Off season and nights are my favorite times to visit such places. Shop windows are lit showing off a variety of wares, chairs stacked on tables in restaurants and signs welcoming customers back tomorrow hang in all the windows.

These images were taken long After Hours in both Maine and Massachusetts. I have tried to show the quiet loneliness of the nights and early mornings and the signs of the little remaining life after hours. I hope that people will once again return to small neighborhood business districts, appreciate the value of small town life and the connection with artists, vendors, professionals and neighbors.

Regarding Bhutan

Before I went to Bhutan, I thought my trip was about witnessing the Bhutanese people’s transition from an agrarian Buddhist culture to a 21^st century Buddhist culture. I certainly saw red-robed monks with cell phones, farmers hauling fodder on their backs for their cows and prayer flags attached to phone towers. I also watched people wear traditional ghos and kiras, while others wear hoodies and jeans.

But ultimately, I realized what I wanted to see in Bhutan was the ordinary and the universal.  Regarding Bhutan is a photographic collection of people going about their lives – kids with money looking for treat down at the store, a shopkeeper waiting to go home, a monk teasing a younger monk.  My trip became about seeing new people in a new place with a different culture and searching for something familiar.

Terra Novus (New Land)

At the market, I pick each one up, pulled in by the shapes as they sit together, waiting. I feel its heft in my hand, enjoy the textures of the skin or peel, and begin to look closer and closer. The patterns on each individual surface marks them as distinct. I push further still, discovering territory unseen by the casual observer, a new land. I am like a satellite orbiting a distant planet, taking the first-ever images of this newly envisioned place.

This project started as an homage to Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30  (I am, ironically, allergic to peppers). As I looked for my subject matter at the market, I found that I wasn’t drawn to just one single fruit or vegetable. There were so many choices, appealing to both hand and eye. I decided to print in black and white to help make the images visually more about the shapes, and not about guessing which fruit is smoothest, which vegetable is greenest.

While You Sleep

My project sprang from an Atelier conversation assignment in which we students were to choose an artist in whose work we were interested. Like many, I have been a long-time admirer of Todd Hido’s work. His lovely, lonely landscapes and night neighborhood scenes resonate deeply with me.

Inspired by his masterful photos, I attempted to recreate his night scenes and create a few of my own. I found trailer parks as well as rundown motels that did indeed delight. But one night, I didn’t really feel like lurking in a nearby neighborhood so I went to a nearby open field instead. I was hooked.  With frozen fingers and long exposures in the cold night came unexpected colors and surprises of headlights flying through my compositions. Watching clouds float by and constellations rise in the winter sky recalled a childhood fascination with astronomy.  Hearing the yipping of far-off coyotes and the sound of wind in owl wings above me felt like medicine.

My project, While You Sleep, has been my conduit for rediscovering the natural world and reviving the enchantment I felt when I first embarked on my journey in photography.

Lost in the Water

There was literally no where else to go. As a photographer, my world had been increasingly limited by my health. The natural world that I loved seemingly had turned into an enemy. As someone committed to the environment, I had always hoped my work could somehow help to protect our water. Turns out, I needed the water’s help much more than it needed mine.

I found a place where I could be close to the water, and yet safe from it and from pretty much any other potential threat. At first, I photographed it as I might a landscape, trying to capture the overall scene. That was interesting, but ultimately didn’t work. It was just too messy, a state of mind I couldn’t handle. I narrowed down my field of view over weeks and finally found a “zone.” I was lost. That was where I needed to be. The idea of being “lost in the water” tends to invoke a fear of drowning, which is understandable. I found just the opposite.

Silhouette

Until the appearance of color photography, people used to hand color black and white pictures to show “what they really see”. In this project, I took the reverse approach and asked because of the advent of color photography “what we do not see anymore”, what could only be expressed through black and white photography? Traditionally, Japanese culture has a minimalist aesthetic derived from Zen philosophy. This is the idea that too much information prevents us from seeing the essence of objects, ideas and the real beauty behind them. Through this project, I got rid of color, the models’ facial expressions and objects that would show the year the photo was taken in order to focus on capturing the nostalgic moments of ordinary people from different backgrounds. Through this project, staying true to Zen ideals, I tried to capture the essence and beauty of human beings laying beneath the surface.

Over Familiar

Along the road to my house there is a marsh. I pass by it everyday, but that’s all I did, pass by. Two years ago, with the marsh frozen over, I decided to fight through the brush, past the dead cattails and follow the paths cut out by the beavers to see what I could find. My efforts revealed a large clearing, one that was masked by the trees that line the roadside.

I began to wonder what else I was passing by each day that I had simply never found. And then I discovered drones.

I flew a drone over places I thought of as familiar, seeing them from a new perspective and revealing aspects I could never have otherwise noticed. I realized that as I became comfortable and developed a routine in a particular location I stopped investigating and started to take for granted the places I loved the most.

This project is my attempt to rectify this oversight in hopes of gaining a greater appreciation for the things that have become over familiar.

Depth Perception

The idea for this project was born when I first visited Yosemite National Park in 2013. In the years leading up to my visit, all I had seen were pictures on postcards, and I was a bit underwhelmed. All those who had been before, built up Yosemite’s lore in my head. It wasn’t until I got there and stood at the base of Half Dome that I understood how people felt.

I realized there was a feeling I got from physically being there, a feeling I couldn’t replicate from looking at postcards. From then on I searched for a way that I could share this feeling through photographs. While there is no substitute for seeing things with your own eyes, I believe I’ve gotten a little bit closer. I want these photos to be explored and to mimic this feeling, the feeling of stepping into the scene.

 

Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows)

The images in my series of portraits were created with a Film Noir mood and atmosphere inspired by movies such as “The Big Sleep” and “Double Indemnity” and “The Maltese Falcon”. The faces here were constructed by using dramatic light and shadow designed to express a sense of the mystery of that era.

I am also trying expose something that is essential to each subject’s personality… the essence of how they live, how they love, how their strength drives them; everyone has ever-changing moods and unique emotions, style, and grace. Bodies and faces that might not be perfect but are profoundly human. Coming out of the shadows brings a story to each image.