CUBA: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM 1990’S CUBA
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I first traveled to Cuba in 1990. Over the next six years I took twelve month-long trips, traversing the island numerous times, and taking over 25,000 photographs. Immersing myself in Cuba’s history, literature and politics, I photographed interiors of homes and businesses, city streets, rural landscapes, signs and billboards, and, most of all, the people, creating a compelling body of work that captures the subtleties and layered complexities of day-to-day Cuba.
Cuba: The Elusive Island published by Harry N. Abrams in 1996 first brought together 100 of these images, along with a selection of writings by some of Cuba’s most important writers. Twenty years later, I re-edited the images, while working to preserve the original 6 x 9 color negatives. Viewing the photographs through a prism of time and change revealed a new more complex view of the work’s historical significance. It is a record of elements that no longer exist and captures Cuba poised on the brink of change. Damiani Editore published 120 of these images as The Cuba Archive in 2017.
As a body of work born from complete engagement and informed perspective, it is both comprehensive and intimate. As a historic record, it chronicles 1990s Cuba and bears witness to the spirit and integrity of a distinctive, resilient, and complex country and its people.
Photographs from this series are held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. They have been exhibited in the US and Havana, and were featured in the Cuba Is 2017 exhibition and documentary about photographers working in Cuba at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, CA.
LOISAIDA STREET WORK: 1984 TO 1990
In 1984, I moved to a tenement building on Clinton Street on New York City’s Lower East Side. I wandered the streets photographing as if in a foreign land. It was as gritty, authentic and humble as it was exotic, vibrant and colorful. The melding cultures and humanity I encountered inspired these photographs.
I left the neighborhood and the work behind in 1990. The negatives languished until the pandemic. Resurrecting this series through editing, scanning, and sequencing for book form, I apply a contemporary perspective to historical photographs. It is a new body of work that lives at the intersections of my encounters and the viewers’ observations as seen through a prism of time. It is a visual record of a 1980s Lower East Side that has been radically altered through waves of gentrification. Universally, the images speak to the human condition, reflecting what is eternal and what is intrinsically New York City – vibrancy, diversity, co-existence, and eccentricity.
Damiani Editore-Italy will publish Loisaida Street Work 1984-1990 in the spring of 2023. Sean Corcoran, the senior curator of prints and photographs of The Museum of the City of New York will contribute an introduction.
Medium: 4 x 5 inch, 6 x 9 cm, 645 and 35mm color negative formats scanned to produce 16 x 20 inch archival pigments prints. Selected images produced as 24 x 30 inch and 30 x 40 inch prints.
IT IS ALWAYS NOW
For more than 30 years I have been chronicling the intimate — life at the Blue House on Ninigret Pond. In this familial landscape, I am drawn to the nuances and gestures, the day-to-day-private moments and the rituals amidst the fluid terrain of the domestic interior. With equal import, I return again and again to capture certain views of the pond, the beech tree, and the garden as I revere the natural world that encompasses this place. Like a compass to navigate, I use my camera as an engaged observer and recorder, photographing quietly and respectfully, while keeping myself at a protective remove. A journal of sorts, biographical and subjective, it is a collection of images embedded with layers of memory, emotion and personal symbolism.
There exists the metaphorical possibility of place here. In the dichotomy between the beauty of the natural setting and the disarray of the familial dwelling, visual clues decode bonds and illuminate spiritual connections between self, family, home, and land.
Family photographs, by their nature, have a singular point of view — they tell one side of the story. They can invite dialogue, introspection and new perspectives while being vessels — visual records of fleeting experiences and ephemeral memories. I hold these thoughts as I continue to photograph and while I mine this growing archive with increasing clarity. As years slip by my siblings and I age, our parents have passed on, we weather storms, and the landscape endures. Time compresses and collapses. At the Blue Hours on Ninigret Pond it is always now.
Medium: 6 x 9 cm and 6 x 7 cm color negative film scanned to produce 16 x 20 inch archival pigment prints.
GROW: 1995 TO PRESENT
What began as the documentation of the steady decline of Scenic Gardens, a local nursery in Charlestown RI, has expanded into an investigation of the myriad environments where domesticated plants are grown. As small-scale nurseries compete with big box stores, their numbers dwindle, and I have been compelled to document several before their ultimate demise.
Equally compelling is the symbiotic relationship between the growers and their charges, so my investigation has included private green houses, and the nursery Issima in Little Compton, RI that specializes in the propagation under cultivated and native species.
The images focus on the intersection of the organic and inanimate, where the static- architecture and man made materials-meets the ever evolving- land, soil and plant life. Sometimes verdant and luscious and other times decrepit and decaying the cycle of life is played out in these controlled environments where the human hand is always evident.
Medium: 6 x 7 cm and 6 x 9 cm color negative film scanned to produce 16 x 20 inch archival pigment prints.
SAND SEA SKY: THE BEACHES OF SAGAPONACK
Is it possible to discover the infinite in a three-mile stretch of beach on the eastern end of Long Island? Sand Sea Sky- The Beaches of Sagaponack, a 10 year/10,000 image project, affirms one can. In 1998 I began photographing the hourly and daily permutations of tide, wind, sand, and sky of the beaches of Sagaponack, New York. What began as documentation of a fragile and pristine landscape became a journey through the totality of the circle of time and seasons that connects us with our essential nature. At times subtle and soft, other times vibrant and surging, these natural forces are capable of invoking peacefulness and calm, or powerful strength and awe. Mesmerizing and evocative, the abundance of fleeting and radiant moments is a testament to the beauty inherent in these organic elements. These photographs of this vulnerable landscape invite thoughtful concern about the environmental preservation of special places that engage our capacity for wonder. They are a meditation, paying homage to a place where change is constant, primordial forces resonate, and the spirit is restored.
In spring 2012 Daniani Editore-Italy published Sand Sea Sky: The Beaches of Sagaponack. The 63 selected images document a meteorological drama ranging from the threatening and explosive storm to the suffusing sunlight of midday and incandescent gloaming. Carl Safina, Blue Ocean Institute president, scientist, and award-winning author contributes an essay.
Photographs are available in 30”x 40” and 40” x 50” archival pigment prints in editions of 15 with three artist’s proofs.
MY TREES
Stepping outside my back door I find inspiration and connection to the primordial in the most ordinary of places. Organic and humble, my backyard trees are my muses in these compositions of temporal abstraction. Singular images, when arranged as triptychs, venture beyond the periphery of the frame to an expansive ungrounded perspective of depth and perception. They convey a sense of freeing disequilibrium and engagement, like a child, dizzy with delight, spinning while looking up at the sky.
Archival pigment prints are 37.5" x 96" in editions of 7 with 3 artists proofs.
HARBOR HOUSE
For over ten tears, I have photographed “Harbor House,” my family’s Virgin Islands home. These interior landscapes bear evidence to the household, its inhabitants, and the expression of personalities and aesthetics in an ever changing yet enduring domestic environment. It is an intimate dialogue told through color and light, texture and form, and through the many elements, functional and decorative, banal and eccentric, that make a house a home.
The ongoing process of photographing this home, with its wear and decay, chronicles the passage of time while preserving the visual vestiges of memories, stories, and a family’s history. Harbor House is an evolving biography of a place and its inhabitants and an archetype of the house that harbors us all.
Prints are 16”x20” type C prints in editions of twenty printed by the photographer.