My creative potential lay dormant for many years while pursuing a career as a public health scientist and researcher. Over the last eight years, my newly found creative energy has been channeled into black and white and color photography and, more recently, monoprinting. I still use a film camera and do not use digital enhancement of my images.
My photography interest is an outgrowth of professional work travel to more than 30 countries. My images usually record a way of life that no longer exists or common surroundings that may be taken for granted and not recognized for their uniqueness and beauty. I especially enjoy the unplanned images of street photography, which allows me to explore an area, meet people, and make discoveries about a culture, which I then dissect and reduce to discrete pieces. Reflections and repetition seem to emerge in much of my work. In addition, I have an appreciation of nature from my dad, which leads me to spend a fair amount of time photographing the natural landscape.
This exhibit grew out of images from France, Cuba and Utah. Both the built and natural environment are recorded. Streetscapes illustrate architectural details from Paris and Havana, both great cities for walking. Canyons of the Escalante in Boulder, Utah was designated a national park by President Clinton. It is a remote wilderness area with an intricate network of canyons and desert dating back millions of years. Petroglyphs of the Anasazi Indians and corn storage vessels are still in evidence. The hiking is fabulous and includes mazes of sandstone cliffs, slot canyons, rocks with striations of color, caves with pools of water, many forms of desert life, and the Escalante River.
For this show I complemented my photographs with monoprints. Monoprinting is a brand new medium for me and I love it. It provides an opportunity to further reduce my photographs into more basic elements and turn them into abstract images. I plan to develop a body of work in this area. For this exhibit I have created a series of dyptics or pairs of images where the original photograph has been turned into a monoprint. I want to thank Esther Maschio for encouraging me to pursue this new medium.