Through these workshops I am letting go of much I have done in the past few years.  The images of the Roma that I have been carting about for a year-and-a-half are being shelved indefinitely.  My work with them as “documentary” pieces is finished.  What a relief.  I have to find a new space in which to see the world, and by that I mean finding a new perspective.  Alex’s eye has inspired me to see with a more searching heart and Rebecca’s from a fresher sense of the poetic nature that all visual circumstances embody.  They really opened themselves up an revealed themselves as human beings in search of an explanation, a charecteristic of artists in every genre.

So I have learned to see the human body as a portrait through Tanya Marcuse; to use the photographic image as a “literary” thread from Mary Ellen Mark; and the build on this “literary” photographic story-telling by challenging my eye to see from a more immediate, layered and emotional point-of-view.  That last one is from the Webbs, who, I feel, come to their art through compassion and a need for comprehension of their own place within the experience.

It’s all about people and intimacy for me.  The document is two-dimensional, although necessary for my own exercise.  Now I will search for something about the interior, without which the external image is merely a shell.

I wish to make at least 4 exposures tomorrow (or five) so I can include them in the portfolio I am presenting to the Webbs this weekend in Woodstock.  These will be part of the “Wright Morris” project, a series of b/w and color pieces that have been inspired by Morris’ work during his travels through America.  They are an expression of sadness and light, whimsy and decay…In some cases the crumbling towers of old feed silos echo the mountain fortresses I have seen in my European travels, like ancient Byzantine strongholds plundered by warring tribes.  In others, like the image above, it is a memory of a previous rural life fast disappearing in the small New York county I live in.  In both cases the past is a reminder of the lack of permanence.  Time stands still for no one, even in the sensory deprivation tank of a darkroom.