News
4.23.21 - 6.26.21
Layered Light: Contemporary Pinhole and Zone Plate Photography
I’m delighted and honored that my pinhole portrait of opera singer Davóne Tines is included in this international exhibition juried by Nancy Spencer and Scott McMahon. The Silver City, NM exhibition features black and white and color images made with film and digital tools and includes work by the following thirty-four photographers from around the world: Jane Alynn, Carolina Arellanos, Syl Arena, Charles Birnbaum, Diana Bloomfield, Julia Bradshaw, Robert Brown, Larry Bullis, Chris Byrnes, Dennis Collins, Walter Crump, Noah Doely, Eugene Ellenberg, Julie Enos, RA Friedman, Citlalli González, Julie Hamel, Lisa Hoffman, Frank Kaczmarek, Stefan Killen, Nancy Marshall, Jeff McConnell, Thomas Miller, Janet Neuhauser,Robert Oehl, Heather Palecek, Diana Pankova, Carmen Ruiz, Louise Russell, Nick Tauro Jr., Marko Umicevic, Stephanie Williams, and Ksawery Wrobel.
My portrait of Tines was produced in 2017 as part of a commission by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to photograph the creatives in the Matthew Aucoin opera Crossing, based on Walt Whitman’s Civil War journals.
Davone 2, 2017
4.13.21
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: A Pinhole Photography Project
Join me on YouTube for an hour of time-traveling with Walt Whitman! (“Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”). Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener, poet Howard Nelson, and I read Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” screened 80 of my pinhole photos of New York City ferries, and discussed Whitman’s sweeping meditation on time, our interconnectedness, and the transcendent power of art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10gDazWQx4
Produced by the Walt Whitman Initiative.
In 2009 I was photographing the NYC harbor for a commercial story about sunken Guggenheim treasure in the waters off Staten Island. Without realizing it I was, from the Staten Island Ferry, being pulled into the imagery that Whitman said future readers of his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” would experience. Digging deeper into my ferry-riding I read the poem and poet Howard Nelson’s essay on it. Nelson’s observations — about the poem’s kinesthetic quality and about how, in his daily ferry-riding, Whitman was moving among archetypes — reminded me of my blurry, dream-like photos and sparked an idea: to make an interdisciplinary book on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that included the poem, my photos, and several essays.
