about
I am a photographer and photography teacher based in Princeton, New Jersey.
Change is constant. The process of growing older is a fact. My latest project, Traces of Time addresses a lifetime of memories, love, sexuality, family, beauty, decay, fragility, longevity, vulnerability, sickness, health, and death. It has to do with moments and people that are gone. The project started when I fractured my pelvis, was immobile, and could only get around with a walker. Friends sent bouquets and with severely limited motion, I began to photograph them on my kitchen table, finding beauty in their decay. From that initial work I have continued in many directions: among them portraits, flowers frozen in melting ice, images created with a scanner, combining live and dead flowers, painting on vegetation, and observing the passage of time in nature.
For many years I specialized in documentary and portrait photography, focusing on people who live in developing countries and who face challenges many in the developed world can't easily imagine. In the fall of 2006, for example, I traveled to Uganda to photograph one group of children orphaned by AIDS and another undergoing rehabilitation after having served as child soldiers in the revolutionary army trying to overthrow the government. In 2008, journalist, Christine Gorman and I documented nurses and health care in Malawi. I've also documented the experience of blindness all over the world, traveling to China, Guatemala, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Nepal, India and the Brazilian Amazon to show how the sightless live in very different kinds of society. Among my other projects have been a photographic essay on aging, part of a major exhibition at the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia; a five-page spread in People magazine on the 50th reunion of Holocaust survivors who remained in Germany for several years after the war; and a photo essay on the mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico.
My work has been supported by many non-profit organizations including World Vision, Helen Keller International, the International Eye Foundation, the Seva Foundation. It has also been recognized with several awards, including a Fellowship in Photography from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; a Village Voice Documentary Photography Grant; and a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.