Alchemy

Alchemy: combining ordinary elements and turning them into something extraordinary, sometimes in a way that cannot be explained.

Mannequins and reflections have captivated my interest as the subject of my photography for many years.  Mannequins can be a fanciful and stylized representations of people.  I take advantage of window reflections to achieve more mysterious, enigmatic, layered, and multi-dimensional pictures through the juxtaposition of the animate and inanimate, nature and architecture, the embodied and disembodied.  The observer is invited to study the reflections to discern what is inside and outside the window.

Reflections, Refractions, and Interactions

Urban environments and traveling by train anywhere are exciting to me. They cause me to reflect on the nature of humankind. We have an incessant need to build, to take over space, insert ourselves – often without consideration to what was already there and how it might be ok if weleave it be. Iʼm interested in nature’s tenacity to will itself to exist where weʼve made it nearly impossible and how it engages with our built environment.

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Construction sites are beautiful. And daunting. Big, and loud, and full of decisions that may or may not include the needs of the people or communities they are intended to serve. Still I get entranced by the beauty of the forms, the spaces and  especially the colors of construction sites in the night. One can see the skeletons of these great behemoths for only a short time. Soon they will go from rough guts and lights to streamlined glass and stone.

While the site is active, the rhythms of the workers, the booming of the machines, the grit and grind generate adrenaline. Itʼs addictive. Then the quiet calm of shooting at night is an adventure all on its own – I set up my photographic rig and am consumed by some mythical world that stands large before me.

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Roaming the landscape on trains is another way for me to observe and understand the scale of our intrusions on the terrain – some are lyrical and beautiful a perfect cohabitation of people and the rest of nature. But it often doesnʼt take long to see where weʼve imposed ourselves disrespectfully. These reflections, refractions, interactions of our organic world with our built one give me a wild sense of joy and sometimes a desperate sense of impending apocalypse. Still I love being here.

The Land Beyond the Forest

The Land Beyond the Forest is an ongoing series depicting a fading way of life in rural Transylvania. This mountainous and remote region of Eastern Europe is steeped in history and lore. The rugged Carpathian Mountains kept invaders at bay and kept the remote villages isolated from the passage of time.

I am drawn time and again to this region and these people because it reminds me of a way of life that I experienced at my grandparent’s village in Hungary every summer. As a child, I was oblivious to the hardships that people faced and experienced only kindness and warmth. With my camera I work to recapture this feeling of storybook wonder and show domestic tableaux and rural people as I remember them. My hope is to show the magic and poetry of the people who inhabit the The Land Beyond the Forest.

 

Yesterday’s Flowers

Yesterday’s Flowers is a series of photographs of flowers that were used in the family home in South India for daily prayers. Fresh flowers adorn and shower the Hindu gods during the daily puja rituals and remain near the idols all day. Having served their function, dried and spent, the flowers are swept up early the next morning before the new day’s prayers are chanted. Having observed these rituals for many years, I began photographing these floral remnants of prayer as a way to honor and appreciate them during this final stage of their sacred journey.

Andre and Elizabeth

In 1977, the great photographer Andre Kertesz found a small glass bust in the window of a New York City book store.  It reminded him of his late wife, Elizabeth.  It was the purchase of this inspirational figurine that allowed Kertesz to work through his overwhelming grief and transform from a broken man back into a vibrant artist. “From My Window”, Kertesz’s book of images using this figurine is for me the most emotional, romantic work of photography I have ever experienced.

About 15 years ago, inspired by the book and the story of Andre and Elizabeth, I had these figures made.  To me, they tell a story of love, longing, and redemption.

This project reimagines Andre and Elizabeth, together again, unburdened by time – living, loving, and struggling.

The Poetry of Mushrooms

I study mushrooms in a most unscientific way. While there are more than 10,000 known species in North America, I couldn’t name more than one or two of those I’ve unearthed. I have read that some toadstools glow in the dark while others are infamously hallucinogenic, but I don’t know why or how. Instead, I’m captivated by the toadstool’s infinitely varied beauty.  Oblivious to the sky or horizon, I walk familiar country lanes head bent to the world at my feet. Seemingly overnight, new fungi sprout from the leaf litter like bouquets from a secret admirer. The language of love is often spoken through flowers, but the elegant and fabled toadstool speaks louder to me.

The mushrooms I collect come mostly from my yard or neighboring woods, as much a part of my home as the possessions in my house. The shapes and colors of toadstools remind me of my stash of inherited treasures:  faded thread from Nana’s sewing basket, Great Aunt Adelaide’s teapot, or my mother’s linen tablecloth.  I combine these artifacts with backdrops crafted from the pages of hand-me-down books or scraps of old fabric. The tiny vignettes portray my mushrooms in domestic scenes meant to tell stories of a real or imagined past. Each portrait is a prayer, a spell I cast in search of feelings remembered or wished for.

In the summer of 1922, Alfred Stieglitz began to take photographs of clouds, tilting his hand camera towards the sky to produce dizzying and abstract images of their ethereal forms. Stieglitz called these photographs Equivalents. More than describing the visible surfaces of things, the works could express pure emotion, paralleling the artist’s own inner state. I find my inner state reflected in the turbulence of rivers.

The Ambiguous Forest

In Maine there is a certain coastal rainforest which simultaneously attracts and alarms me.  Despite biting insects, slithery creatures, startling creaks, cracks and groans, I have been drawn there over decades.

A soggy and often hazardous walk into the forest of gnarled and majestic trees, reveals plush mossy patches, tiny lichen gardens and startling evidence of nature’s violent, destruction and insistent decay.

I photograph the forest to share and reveal it since few will enter there with me.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Early this spring, before temperatures began to climb, I began to inspect stone walls in my front yard. Close examination revealed deep green mosses and some very unexpected growth, that at first looked like mushrooms but turned out to be Lichens. They are easily seen from a short distance, but the amazing variety of shapes, colors and textures can only be seen up very close.

Lichens are not plants but a composite organism of algae or bacteria living in a mutualistic relationship with fungi, just as reef-building corals have a mutually beneficial relationship with microscopic algae. One estimate is that lichens cover up to 6% of total land surfaces and yet we pass them by every day. Every inspection reveals something new and interesting.