Beauty Leaving

For me, 2010-2011 was a year of tremendous heart-wrenching loss. First, we lost my adored nephew, only 16 years old, a loving young man and a promising and gifted photographer. Soon after that devastation, my beloved friend and mentor Richard Fammerée, the brilliant poet and composer/musician, was diagnosed with ALS. Within a year of that diagnosis, he too was gone. They were both beautiful souls, taken from a world that loved and revered them. Looking for a symbol to represent these lovely beings, I realized that I could show Beauty as a lovely woman who would symbolize a sort of "muse of sorrow", always turned away from the camera, forever caught in the act of departure.

Beauty is a mythological image. She represents all that is exquisite in the world, and the act of her leaving is about loss and longing. The act of going away represents the emptiness we all feel when we lose someone we love, someone who makes our lives rich and full, someone we cannot imagine our lives without.

The scarf and blowing silk represent comfort and security, lost sensuality an earthly existence. It floats away on the breeze like a human spirit.

Coming soon...

The Beds Project

The most moving photograph on earth, for me, is Imogene Cunningham's "Unmade Bed".  I hope to one day own a print of that evocative, iconic image.  In any case, inspired by her/it, I have been taking shots of the beds I sleep in as I travel to photograph, which I generally do alone. They reference much needed rest, and act as a visual record of the dreams I leave on the pillow, in the tangled bedclothes, in the rooms I inhabit as a photographer on the prowl for the next image, and the next.

For a long time, they were tight shots of the variety of beds, rooms, the bedspreads or duvets, often with my cameras on them.  Then several years ago in India, I shot one unmade, because I was about to leave that hotel to go out to shoot, and then catch a plane, and I remembered I hadn't done it yet.  When I got the film back, I was struck by the feelings I experienced looking at the beauty and simplicity of the wrinkled white, the indented pillows, and the whole sort of disheveled quality of the place where I had dreamt through the night, as well as the abstract quality of the whole scene.

 And so, that work shifted completely for me.  This project has gained new depth and dimension in each of places I wake up; in Paris, Copenhagen Ghent, Agra, Hamburrg, Helsinki, etc.  The number of beds will grow, and the titles will reflect the locations.  I plan to show them printed large & box-mounted, a testament to process and dreams, inspiration and personal journey.