When I was growing up, Harry (dad) was the family shutterbug. He had an Eastman Kodak brownie camera that took two-and-a quarter inch square photos and was his most precious possession.  In fact, no one else in the family would have ever considered touching it—not Kitty (mom), nor either of my two older sisters (Deedee or Patti), nor I.  In fact, when he wasn’t actually taking photos, he carefully guarded his camera (along with his Playboy magazines), in the bottom of his wardrobe, under lock and key. 

We were a working-class family living in a working-class Manhattan neighborhood, on the 4th floor of a 6-story apartment building that was right across the street from the 207th street elevated stop on the 7th avenue (IRT) line.  Dad’s parents, Bertha and Benny, immigrated to NYC with their families as teenagers, from a town in the Ukraine known as Chernigova.  Every summer they rented a bungalow for us in the Rockaways, a few blocks from the beach.  Dad worked in the city during the week but every Friday afternoon he would take the A-train to our stop at 44th Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard.

My fondest memories are those I spent swimming in the ocean with mom.  She was a strong, confident and beautiful swimmer with a long, graceful stroke, which she learned by watching Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan) and Esther Williams (Jane) in the movies.  With me perched on her back holding onto her bathing suit straps, she would swim far out to sea, a long way past where the jetties ended and the waves would break. Dad captured us riding the waves into shore.  I was just 5 years old.

After I went off to college, dad moved to Florida with his second family, leaving behind all the photos he took of us.  Mom stayed in NYC.  After mom passed away—her ashes scattered at sea by the armed services (she had been a WAC during WWII)—Deedee became the keeper of the photos, negatives and all, which over the years had been crammed into a black-and-white marbled photo box and several old shoe boxes.  She sent me armfuls of photos and handed off the negatives to cousin Grace who offered to digitize them. None of us can remember what happened to Dad’s brownie camera. 

I got my first camera when I was 19 years old. It was a brand new 35 mm Konica given to me by my mom’s Haitian boyfriend, Michel.  Without even opening the box, I traded it in for a Pentax “Spotmatic.”  I took my very first picture of the northbound train that followed the Hudson River.  It was wintertime; the tracks and the branches of the trees alongside the tracks were snow-covered.

In 1973, Russ Nichols, the soon-to-be first husband of a friend of mine, gave me a quick lesson in basic darkroom techniques—developing b&w film and printing—in a three-hour session at Goucher College. Russ was a filmmaker, (an Olympic canoeist), and a perfectionist, so I learned pretty good habits.  

I transferred to Cornell University and after graduating I worked as a lab assistant in Animal Cytogenetics for Professor Stephen Bloom.  One of my tasks was to make photo enlargements of the mutations in 4-day old chick embryo chromosomes which I had exposed to various chemicals (food dyes, pesticides, and anti-cancer agents), as part of Bloom’s ongoing mutagenesis research.  On weekends, Bloom let me use the darkroom for my own photos.  That’s when I discovered Cibachrome—a positive-to-positive process using color transparencies (in my case, Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 100) to make color prints.  Cibachrome’s intensity, color saturation and luminosity were absolutely thrilling.  Of course, the subject matter helped too.  My first color prints were of red Trillium—with its rich, blood-red colored petals that signaled springtime in the forests and woodlands around Ithaca—and of the Great Spangled Fritillary—a gorgeous orange, yellow and rust-colored butterfly with black bars and white polka dots.  

In 1978, my best friend, Steve Lapointe and I decided to apply to be Peace Corps volunteers. We were given the choice of going either to Afghanistan or Honduras.  We were leaning toward Afghanistan which seemed more interesting culturally (and more dramatic visually), even though it was also known to be rather repressive for women.  We met a lovely couple in Ithaca who had lived in Afghanistan for several years, and after spending an evening with them, we were psyched. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Peace Corps pulled out its volunteers. At that point, our choices were either Honduras or Liberia. We chose Honduras, thinking that learning Spanish would be a good skill to have. As it turned out, both Afghanistan and Honduras were dangerous places.  The former had a war, while  Honduras had a military dictatorship supported by U.S. corporations and our government.  

We were sent first to La Guácima, Alajuela, Costa Rica for 10 weeks to learn Spanish and tropical agriculture.  After training, we were transferred to our site—a town called Tocoa, beyond Standard Fruit Company’s banana and African palm plantations, and far from the Caribbean sea.  It was a frontier town where all the men who were “men,” carried machetes.  Saloons were everywhere; bar fights and gunfire were common occurrences.  No one had running water, indoor toilets or electricity. A few of the homes we were invited to had television sets, but of course, no electrical outlets to plug them into. The heat was really quite remarkable. It was so hot that the candles melted even when they were unlit. This was the tropics after all.

In the rainy season, the roads in and out of Tocoa were impassable.  The air strip was a goat field. The only planes that could fly in were DC-3’s and they had to make a pass or two over the field to scare off the goats and clear it for landing.  The Honduran airlines—LAHSA and SAHSA—flew from Tegucigalpa (the capital), to San Pedro Sula, to La Ceiba, then to Tocoa. We used to joke that SAHSA was the acronym for Stay At Home Stay Alive. (Portfolio 2).  

Our new home consisted of one-half of a cement block structure. The other half was occupied by a lovely young woman and her gun-toting, pistol-whipping husband. The house had a cement floor and screens on the windows. Our water supply was the river, a mile and a half away. On our first day there, we hired a couple of kids with a wheel barrow and several buckets to fetch water from the river and fill a 55-gallon steel drum we had acquired and kept in the backyard. We hired a man to cut a path to the outhouse, also in the backyard. In the process, he killed three coral snakes, which have very potent and deadly venom. We worried about a lot of things besides poisonous snakes while living in Tocoa—stray (and not-so-stray) bullets, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and mosquitos carrying malaria and dengue fever.

To get to the central school (and its satellite schools) where we worked with teachers and kids—digging a well, planting vegetable gardens and papaya trees, and raising rabbits, bees, chickens and pigs—we rode heavy, black clunker bikes called Flying Pigeons, which had been imported from China. At the end of the day, we would return “home” absolutely drenched with sweat. Before settling in for the evening, we would venture into the backyard to the “shower” where we would pour buckets of water over each other from the drum.

I had always been drawn to b&w photography, and I was (and forever will be) in awe of how Ansel Adams could make mountains appear as though they were lit from the inside out. However, I hadn’t yet found myself in a place where the landscapes demanded to be seen in black-and-white.  In Tocoa, my focus was people, particularly the kids we worked with in the schools (Portfolio 2). This is AlmaOndina, one of eight kids who lived next door with their mom. From the window ledge of the front room of their home, they sold mostly warm Coca Colas. The year was 1978.

During our stint in the Peace Corps, we had a chance to visit Guatemala, trekking to Chichicastenango, Panajachel on Lake Atitlán, and Antigua (Portfolio 3). We also visited the Honduran island of Roatán to snorkel in the blue Caribbean Sea.  Oh! how I wished I had an underwater camera.  The life on the reef was simply astounding—manta rays, barracudas, sea turtles, schools of blue tangs, lion fishes, sea anemones and every color and shape of coral.  My fascination with the sea and my respect for its inhabitants have always been with me and evolved photographically into what I have called “Synecdoche” (Portfolio 1) and “Fish” and No-Fish” (Portfolio 3).

On July 19, 1979,  the Sandinistas defeated the 43-year Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.  As things were heating up in the neighboring countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—we were sent to Costa Rica, this time for several weeks, to assist in the training of the next group of volunteers, many of whom would remain in Costa Rica, although a few were sent on to Honduras.  Several years later, I would return to Nicaragua to study the revolution from the ground up, photographing the conditions of life, particularly in the squatter settlements. (Portfolio 1)

In any case, our Peace Corps experience led us back to Ithaca and to graduate school at Cornell University, where Steve studied entomology and I studied sociology with concentrations in Women’s Studies and Latin American Studies.

 After Bolivia, my attention turned to Nicaragua.  The Sandinista victory in 1979, over the corrupt and brutal Somoza dictatorship—a regime that had been supported by the U.S. government for decades—was unprecedented.  During the late 1970s, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, I had witnessed the complicity of the United States in backing a violent military dictatorship.  And, it was well-known that the U.S. government had sided not only with the Honduran military government, but also with the Somoza regime and other dictatorships throughout Latin America. 

I spent the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, photographing the conditions in the squatter settlements in Nicaragua (especially in Managua, León, Estelí, and Masaya) which had arisen since the Sandinista Triumph, and with my best friend and collaborator, Pierre LaRamée, interviewing their residents. We also interviewed the leaders of several grassroots organizations—neighborhood associations and women’s organizations, in particular—that were created both during the struggle and after 1979.  We met so many extraordinary young people who were committed to the revolutionary process and democracy—people who  faced insurmountable odds and powerful opposition both internally and externally, who continued to struggle and fight for justice and freedom from oppression.

Almost all of the photos I shot during those years were in b&w (Plus-X).  A number were later published in sociology journals as photoessays.  (Portfolio 1)

Between 1986 and 2006, I created courses in “Visual Sociology” at several different colleges and universities including Hobart & William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY), St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY) and Bloomfield College (Bloomfield, NJ). An emerging discipline in the 80s, visual sociology is based on the idea that the world we see and create around us says something about who we are as a society and culture; and, it is essential to understand how our “visual” world and all of the images with which we are bombarded, affect us as human beings.

At each school, I managed to scrounge together the resources to make a workable darkroom so that I could teach the students basic darkroom techniques for the photography projects they were required to produce for the course. This was especially the case at Bloomfield College. The director of our media services, a good friend and colleague, Barbara Isacson donated a camera and darkroom equipment (including an enlarger) that had belonged to her late father, Harry Isacson, who had been a photographer. Another colleague of mine, Professor of Physics, Dave Kilbourne, donated equipment and his actual darkroom, which was adjacent to his physics lab and office. Dave often ate his lunch in his office and took a great interest in the photos the students were producing. He would even pop in and occasionally help out. The President of the College, Jack Noonan, provided a grant so that I could buy a third enlarger and chemicals. Each week I scheduled two 4-hour shifts of six students each, sharing three enlargers. It was always a bit chaotic at first. But inevitably, a few of the students would catch on quickly and could help teach those who were having difficulties, so that by mid-semester, we were pretty well-organized.

Their first assignment in “Visual Sociology” was to create an ad campaign, with multiple photographs that they had taken themselves, for something specific—an actual object or a thing (like a place), or an idea (like the notion of tranquility), or an emotion (like compassion)—without ever using the word or the thing itself. A second project was to photograph their world—its interior as well as its exterior. The third was an ethnographic project—on a culture or subculture that they found interesting. Since quite a few of our students were born in other countries—many from Latin American and Caribbean cultures—but grew up in the US, this project gave them a chance to learn more about their heritage. Part of the assignment was to interview members of the group they chose and to allow their subjects to guide them on what to photograph. Their final project was to produce a photoessay or slide show with sound accompaniment, on “the self without the self.” That is, they had to photograph who they were without using any images of themselves. The students definitely produced an interesting and unique body of work.

In 2006, the Chair of the Division of Creative Arts and Technology, jazz musician, bass player and good friend, Chris White, invited me to teach the Division’s first course in “An Introduction to B&W Photography” for the students in his Division, during an intensive summer session. Interest was really high but since the darkroom could only accommodate 12 students, I had to turn away so many students. I spent all the money I earned teaching that course to buy my first digital camera— a CANON EOS-5D.

Learning to use the Canon EOS-5D was a project in itself. First of all, there were many new functions to experiment with. The ability to change the ISO between shots (the ISO correlates to the ASA or film speed of a whole roll of film), gave added flexibility for different lighting environments and effects. The range was so much greater than what I had been accustomed to. Likewise for the shutter speed and F-stop. That was just the beginning. Perhaps most amazing was that I could release the shutter, get immediate feedback and make adjustments (provided the subject was not fleeting). And, I didn’t have to mix chemicals or breathe them in. What I missed, however, was watching the images magically appear in the developing process, and the serenity and sense of freedom and purpose I felt while working—the darkness of the darkroom, lit only by a single red safe light, had been totally enveloping, and interestingly, somehow comforting. Very quickly, picture-taking  became a virtually new experience.

With the change in process and style of working came a change in subject matter. I started “playing” much more—experimenting with many of the  functions/possibilities that digital technology allowed. My work started to take a different direction as I ventured into the realm of abstraction. “Synecdoche” (in Portfolio 1 ) is an example of one “offshoot.” (Synecdoche is a part of speech wherein a single element of the whole represents the whole, or vice versa.) I spent several weeks photographing tropical fish (photoshoots) in different locations—mostly in tropical fish stores in South Florida where I could get up close. Then in the “offshoot,” digitally focusing on an element of a particular fish, cropping and enlarging that element, and shifting the colors of the element and its background. (This was in sharp contrast to my previous film project of photographing larger sea creatures in aquaria around the country—Coney Island, South Jersey, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Key West, Mystic and Norwalk Connecticut, Baltimore, Boston (See: “FISH” and “NO-FISH” in Portfolio 3). As I mentioned early on, the sea and the miracle of water would appear and reappear over the years.