PHOTOGRAPHS

The Mason-Dixon Line has existed in the American imagination as the line demarcating the land of the south, “Dixieland”, human bondage and the states' rights excuse, fallen heros, and the home of the "Blues". In fact, the line was surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon prior to the Revolutionary War to resolve overlapping English land grants to the Penn and Calvert families. It extends east to west bisecting Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia, and vertically, north to south between Maryland and Delaware. The Line cut straight into Native America and is all about property.

Curious to understand the history of the Line I have been spinning circles above and below it, poring over maps, sniffing the wind for revelatory suggestions of original intent, evidence of human fortune, misadventure, and borderland whimsy. I am piecing together a collection of Mason-Dixon ephemera--visual fragments of life on the Line.

1,000 acre Appleton Farms in Essex County Massachusetts is one of the oldest continuously operated farms in the United States. It is an estate I discovered wandering through the woods from my suburban childhood home, and one I returned to in 2018 to capture the beauty of the farm's mature landscape in large format and cyanotype prints.

The work was exhibited at the Ipswich Museum, Ipswich MA in 2019, again in Nashville TN in 2022, and at Gallery Kayafas March 2023.

    Sufferers from the neurological disease Alexia-typically brought on in adulthood-experience an immediate, and almost always permanent inability to understand their native written language. My work often suggests a tension between the written word and the image, language and sensation. Alexia's Lament is an ongoing project.

A few years ago I started a project, "Iron Things" I called it, the title from a line in the Mary Oliver poem The Leaf and the Cloud. I had recently buried my father and "emptied the closets" of the house I grew up in and sold it. My sisters and I each kept what we wanted, locked the door, and left. These are a few of the objects I kept: a packet of hair pins my father saved that were his mother's, my grandfather's French mantle clock and his oil stained shop coat with a few matchbooks in the left pocket, Uncle Oscar's Swedish Book of Psalms, and my Christening Cup.   There is something like deep memory embedded in these, but memory not mine. What memories I do have are of a stern grandmother, and the tool and machine filled wonderland of my grandfather's automotive shop in Essex Connecticut, where time seemed to have stopped when he died. I never knew him, but I think I know the hole his death carved into my father's heart. Now I carry these memory weighted items my father held on to, and other objects from my childhood home.

Listen,

This was his life.

I bury it in the earth.

I sweep the closets.

I leave the house.

I mention them now,

I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love

Nor lack of sorrow.

But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them-one, two, three, four-the kiss of courtesy,

Of sweet thanks,

Of anger, of good luck in the deep earth, May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.

I will not give them the responsibility for my life.

My photographs are found within everyday circumstances. I roam, responding intuitively to enigmatic events, juxtapositions, the play of light. I am attracted to boundaries; the spaces between the obvious and the mysterious, between saying and showing, between the photographer and the subject. Are these boundaries penetrable?

I prefer black and white film, simple cameras, and the traditional darkroom to produce my personal work. The virtual nature of digital photography, its lack of tangibility, “processing” via computer is too cold. I prefer grain as an embedded component of my images. It represents substance.

Growing up as I did in a professional watercolorist’s home, I was surrounded by the simplest of tools; pigments, brushes, paper, and water, and how a few brush strokes can speak volumes. I learned early to respect tools and master the hand.

What am I looking for? I’ll show you when I find it, but within the obvious and everyday I am hoping to create visually delightful images that suggest mystery and prompt more questions than provide answers.

My Holga camera work falls within an ongoing project entitled The Structure of Everyday Life.

Staten Island's Richmond Terrace runs parallel to the Kill Van Kull waterway, from the NY Ferry Terminal to Howland Hook. A mismash of gas stations, dry docks, storefront pentacostal and red brick catholic churches, bodegas, package stores, and small auto repair shops rub shoulders ungently. Chain link connects and separates everything.

Our preoccupation with our portable devices. What in the world did we do without them? Smoked, read books, magazines, and newspapers. Looked out the window or at the world. Held hands?

Out the car window, in a subway, flying, by ferry, on foot. Going from here to there. Photographs along the way.

Five Cents American and a Russian Penny. Two bright tokens. Small, precious change.

Initially, little time or creative thought went into considering how to document the adoption of a child from St. Petersburg, Russia. Frankly, all effort went into arranging our adoption. I have never been presented with so much paperwork to have notarized, apostilled, to file, and had so many fees to pay. It was a dauntingly officious process, bearing little resemblance to bringing our first son into the world. We chose to add to our family through adoption for personal reasons, chose Europe for ancestral, and St. Petersburg for cultural ones. In August 2001 we were offered a three-year-old child living in a state orphanage in the historic Vasileostrovkij district of St. Petersburg and were sent a short video of him rocking on a wooden horse. In the background one could hear an orphanage “Baba” encouraging him to say hello to the camera, hello to momma and papa. The child spoke haltingly and I could not take my eyes off the tear in his. I was floored.

Flying to Russia to meet him and bring him out of the orphanage two months after the September 11th tragedy impressed upon me the importance of making each ephemeral moment count. Within these moments now I seek the telling gesture, the fervent gaze.

A deep sense of personal loss is an immutable component informing any adoption. It is cause for concern and much speculation. And though this project was conceived out of a profound curiosity about this one child, coming to me with little to no familial history, it quickly developed into a project about two boys. I could not look at one child without looking at the other, and became mindful too of my father’s son, my own experience as a child.

A Nickel and a Kopek is a personal testament. It is comprised of images of daily life, nothing in particular going on or historically momentous. Within these insignificant moments I traced the potent features of the universal human experience. Time invested, living.

A christian theme park in the 60s. Now just a lit cross on a hill, a strange and disquieting place littered with lost-looking animal castings, little broken buildings, two headless angels, and non-referential signs. Holyland USA is a place, but it is also an ever-present idea in american culture.

Dogtown Common, located in Gloucester Massachusetts, is a five square mile boulder strewn area noted as one of the best examples of a glacial moraine. The deserted area, though populated in the 1700s, was purchased from the city in the early 20th century by the wealthy, philanthropic, and somewhat eccentric Roger Babson. During the Depression Roger initiated a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project for unemployed stone masons to create a 'stone book' by chiseling twenty-three of his favorite words and phrases onto massive boulders. Since then the open field has been replaced by a mature forest and the stone tablets compete with the undergrowth.