These collages are my way of seeking to join the disparate pasts of my bi-racial heritage. They are made from photographs old enough that most of the people depicted in them have become lost to time. The photographs speak of ages more foreign than distant lands; colonialism, tycoons, plantations, samurai, the jazz age, poverty, and world war. They represent the legacy of two families separated by a vast ocean who had no idea that one day their destinies would intersect.
I try to make sense out these faces peering at me through a sepia haze. They have become empty signs that point to people that are no longer. They are relevant to me only by the names scrawled on their backs and the albums from which they have fallen. Like the early paleontologists assembling the first dinosaur skeletons, I must use my imagination to fill in the gaps, taking liberties to build narratives coherent to me. These old photos are combined with other photos gleaned from thrift shops and garage sales, as well as my own photos to help me understand who I am in the surreal context of America. I am constructing a narrative of my ancestry that is imagined and fanciful, but it is my own.
The images are collaged digitally but finalized through an alcohol transfer process onto handmade watercolor paper.
Colonialism and male fantasy drive the Age of Exploration and Exploitation.
Over a century ago, separated by an ocean and a continent my ancestors had no idea their families would one day intersect.
So many choices of available mates. But only one will get you off the island.
Executive Order 9066, signed by FDR stripped American citizens of Japanese descent of all rights and property.
Beware, divine winds blow in both directions.
It’s an island paradise, but for whom?
The guests that no one wants….
Executive Order 9066 was upheld by the Supreme Court and is their biggest regret to this day.
Was this a photo to announce American citizenship or that of a woman wanting a husband in a far off land?
Little boys, so innocent, yet with paths predetermined.
Migration, land, offspring and heritage - all things people go to war for, but why?
Do we really go to war and sacrifice our youth for principles or is it for control of commodities?
Miscegenation - Illegal, illegal, illegal, except on a tiny archipelago in the middle of the Pacific.
They wielded more power then the men on both sides cared to admit.
Innocence and Optimism. Where do they go?
Take a back seat girls. There’s a new princess in town.
There is nothing more powerful than a persistent narrative. It spans generations and sets the course.
Far away from ancestral eyes new ideas begin to emerge. The innocence of a paradise about to be lost.
When I find myself in a city, whether familiar or new and strange, I am overwhelmed by the sensory stimulation coming at me from all directions. I’ve tried to capture that here with this variation on traditional street photography. Inspired in part by the ancient Chinese scroll landscape and by a serendipitous result with my 1930 Zeiss Ikonta camera, I’ve overlapped frames to make a montage of images to break the boundaries imposed by the single frame.
Walking around in New York City is always an adventure. Everything everywhere is a potential photograph.
On display for public consumption. The gawkers become the subject of the gaze as well.
A hostile barrier precedes a more beautiful neighborhood.
Motown isn’t known for its vegetables. But you can buy them here!
At this ancient gate marking an old boundary of Paris humanity swirls by in all its colors.
Come one, come all to the biggest prize in the art world.
Looking for meaning along the Seine.
Hot and noisy, exhausting and exhilarating. Let’s get an ice cream.
The hustle and bustle of a big city with each footstep a musical note, each stride a rhythm and each block walked a stanza in a never ending composition.
A reorganization of organized space.
Kodaking around Chinatown one fine day.
Looking for Laverne…
Think of the traditional family portrait as a document to prove that the parents are doing a good job meeting societal expectations. This project is an attempt to reveal the conscious construction of reality behind all portraits and photographs in general, by revealing the heavy hand of the artist, that usually has the privilege of invisibility. Between 2004 and 2017 I photographed over 100 families.
I am interested in the representation of the family and the conscious construction of reality that surrounds it. If all photos are fabrications, what does that say about the people in them?
There is a façade that one puts up when they are photographed. This is known as camera face. It is the public face that we hide behind; a barrier behind which we can be ourselves. I may not have succeeded in defusing this but I have done away with the group façade with this project.
By photographing each member of the family separately and collaging the result later I make the photographer's presence impossible to ignore and destroy the idea that a photograph is an objective document. Families are the building blocks of any culture. They come together out of love, necessity and sometimes obligation. They come in all shapes, sizes, formulations and colors.
Ordinary rooms become extraordinary as they become surrealist frames for the families that inhabit them. Families may seem ordinary to the outside observer, but they are rarely anything but.
The very first image in the series, taken for fun at Skaket Beach on Cape Cod. Also the only image in the series taken with film and on a disposable camera.
P.O.V. is a photographic installation that addresses the dominance of the male gaze that has informed image making for millennia.
The viewer enters a circle of 6-foot high light boxes with glowing transparencies of nude photographers photographing. Their penises are limp but their lenses are at attention. The images are positioned so that one can never see all of them at the same time. A sound track of clicking shutters accompanies the piece. The light boxes can number anywhere from 6 to 10 depending on the space.
The men are posed nude and lit in a brutal manner to strip away any pretense of art or cultural sensitivity. We have been seduced for too long by soft lighting and stylistic artistry without considering the one sided control and its long term effects. This project turns the tables on the gendered gaze, allowing the viewer to gawk and judge these figures who in turn are photographing them.
When we look at a photograph it is easy to forget the presence of the photographer who brings to the image a raft of preconceived notions of what an image is supposed to look like, their own prejudices, preferences and agendas. A photograph is never anything but a subjective construction that may reveal truths but is in itself not truth by any means.
The circular placement of the images is meant to evoke a ritual space. Surveillance is ritualized, the gendered gaze is ritualized. The need for attention is ritualized in our culture.
Original sketch for P.O.V.
Fearscape, a live duet between electric violin and digital camera debuted in 2009 during the ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, MI. It was curated by the UICA.
