Greenscapes

Green devices are popping up everywhere in our world, and in our consciousness.  Solar panels are sprouting on rooftops and in fields.  Wind turbines are popping up on the horizon.  Bikes are multiplying on our streets.

With “Greenscapes” I’m exploring the aesthetics of this growing aspect of our culture.  How do these things look and feel?  What’s their effect on the landscape, and on us?

The work travels through different photographic styles and points-of-view with intention.  As I explore green devices as a part of our world, I’d ask you to feel, on a visceral level, how their presence affects you.  The goal of the project is to inquire about how it feels to experience this aspect of change in the world.

Reflections

This series uses flowers to represent our humanity and how we seek to come to terms with our reflections, both inside and out.

Wandering Along the Horizon

I’m drawn to the infinite, creative possibilities photography offers. I’m also eternally grateful to find myself in the midst of their magical moments – particularly when I’m still, listening carefully, exploring, and looking a little bit longer in order to make a picture. My current body of work is an exploration of constructed color, light, and shadow. Inspired by my background in modern dance, these images are formed with an intention to evoke movement, gesture, and sculptural qualities.

One image gently leads our eyes to another, and another, with graceful transitions and composed shapes. The symmetry, lines, angles, and arcs denote a physical vocabulary of suggested movement. Each image, a vignette leading to transitions and rests, as if I’m back in the rehearsal studios working out movements and phrases, wandering across the floor composing, shaping, and re-shaping dancer’s bodies. I’ve found dance, choreography, and photography have much in common.

Surface Tensions

I am intrigued by the infinite characteristics of surfaces especially as they represent boundaries. They can be reflective, receptive, malleable, impenetrable, soft, coarse, tense or yielding, metaphorical or literal, even mathematical, transparent or opaque.  Surfaces are also shaped or influenced by other surfaces layered over them.  This project explores the interplay of boundaries and surfaces as an invitation to meditate on relationships between them.

The Space Between

Between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.

                                                                                                —Viktor Frankl

In early 2020 I began mining my photographic archive—searching for connections, deciphering the language I was speaking—trying to identify signals amidst the noise.

As I began to make new work in response, I found myself “mining forward” what I heard from my archive, expanding my syntax.

 

Places I Never Lived

The series Places I Never Lived is an exploration of the way that people put their mark on the world. While photographing the facade of each house in a sleuth-like fashion, I fantasize about who lives there and what life is like on the inside. It is not spying or voyeurism. It is about imagining my life in a different place.

At the same time what draws me to these places is the echo of a human presence, even though people themselves are absent. Inevitably, a barrier exists between each house and me. Carefully groomed landscaping or fencing can block my way as completely as can a cluster of trees or untrimmed hedges. This, however, only adds to the seductiveness of the place.  And that only reinforces my questions: Who lives in these houses? And who would I be if I lived there?

The Longing of Silence

With this series, I am exploring some of the feelings of the pandemic: hemmed in with no end in sight, longing for family, for one-on-one contact with friends, for freedom from fear, and for ways I could comfort so many, including children and teenagers, close to me and afar, struggling and losing so much during those long days. After 11 months of quarantining, I reached out for human connection even if obscured by masks or glass impediments. Like many others I wanted to record this dramatic shutdown, so urgent in its deprivations, isolation and danger. Most of these photos are taken from a distance either through windows or from the end of walkways. All draw upon light, some through complex reflections, to capture the unnatural multiple barriers of living in fear of the disease and, in other instances, highlighting parts of the portraits representing glimmers of hope and gratitude needed to endure. The losses are great and our stories similar, but different. But in every case, these days have marked us for the rest of our lives.

 

Quiet

My Inspiration as a photographer comes from trying to notice the unnoticed and to photograph those images. It is when you see not only with your eyes but with your heart and soul that a photograph takes on more meaning than just the image you see.  In this collection, I sought out simple settings with unique perspectives to alter its natural beauty and breathe emotions into the images. I was looking to find the tranquility, quietness and peace that is to be found in the world.

 

Sisters

My images explore relationships between sisters, opening a window into their personal narratives.  Sisters have a unique relationship; they grow up in reference to one another, individuals, but tied by family. Having grown up without sisters of my own, I envy and admire the bond that unites them. I find them fascinating to observe. Photographing sisters together not only provides opportunities to capture the range of their interaction, but puts them at ease in my presence

Looking for a revealing moment in these life-long relationships, I typically offer prompts such as, “think of a secret your sister doesn’t know,” or, “what does being angry at each other look like?” I observe the interaction- a sober look, a sly glance, a teasing gesture – waiting for whatever self-consciousness there might be to dissolve and what I perceive as an honest moment to happen. Usually, the interaction is between the sisters, but occasionally it’s with me, which begs the question of have I inserted myself into the picture?

Even though I take the pictures with a digital camera I want the end result to reflect the intimacy and chemistry that my subjects allow me to witness during each photoshoot.

I print my photographs using ziatype, an alternative, photographic process that produces a three-dimensional quality reminiscent of nineteenth century images. The messy borders, a result of brushing light-sensitive solutions on special, heavy-weight artist paper, broadcast that I had a hand in creating the print beyond capturing the image