portraits

1978—mid-1980s

The series it was the sound of the ocean reflected on the relationship I shared with my grandmother when I was a child and young adult. After completing that series, I became more interested in photographing people I knew in the present. Besides my personal connections to the subjects, I was interested in how they presented themselves in certain spaces and situations.

These environmental portraits are from a larger series of photographs of neighbors, family members, and friends in close proximity to me and in their contextualized surroundings. I have been interested in the impact of culture and how individuals accept or reject, sometimes without much thought, cultural and social norms and behaviors that could be represented in visual ways. With what was already in place and with some rearranging for the camera perspective, the images themselves provide indicators about the relationship between the subjects, their artifacts and their lifestyles.

I acknowledge the many photographers whose photographs informed my thinking about portraits before the early 1980s. I pay homage to Esther Bubley, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, Lewis Hine, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Dorothea Lange, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Susan Meiselas, Lisette Model, Arnold Newman, August Sander, W. Eugene Smith, and James Van Der Zee to name a few.