Born and raised in NJ, I first discovered my love for photography through the lens of a small plastic camera, courtesy of Bazooka Joe and his Bubble Gum comics I’d saved. Before making our first trip to Alaska in 1979 my husband and I bought our first 35mm SLR and gave ourselves a crash course in how to use it. We eventually settled in the Hudson Valley 30 years ago and I have been photographing our adventures and travels ever since. In recent years while taking a more concentrated approach to my photography I have found my view of the world changing and opening up. I am continually amazed at how light can completely transform a landscape or subject.
One of the most compelling projects that I keep striving to capture is mother nature’s ability to wrap her “arms” around what has naturally died or that man has left abandoned. When a tree dies or a building is left on it’s own, roots and foundations pull up, paint peels, colors fade, metal rusts, moss spreads and vines wrap their arms around them. All of these processes help nature’s colors seep in and in turn bring those abandoned things back into mother nature’s fold.
My series “Everyday Reflections” began with an image made at an old Cannonball factory. Ever since I find myself frequently seeing everyday moments or subjects through different perspectives such as reflections in water or glass. Trying to capture these images may at times look like composites or double exposures but in fact they are taken as single shots. Sometimes reflections will mirror reality or alter reality just slightly and sometimes it transforms a vision of reality into an entirely different landscape.
“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back.”
– Henri Cartier Bresson