When my youngest child prepared to leave home, I found myself drawn to the wooded landscapes near our house in suburban Boston. The natural world offered a broader perspective on my family’s imminent transition and I began to make pictures during walks with the dog. Since 2018, I have been experimenting with polyptychs in my work. I find that multiple-panel presentations create dialogs between space and form, imply passages of time and create arresting visual stutters. I have discovered surprising patterns and details in overlapping frames that echo with history, literary myth and personal memory. 

As I have wandered in the footsteps of the transcendental writers in and around nearby Concord, Massachusetts, I have witnessed nature unfolding through the seasons. I have formed a physical and psychological bond with this place that is steeped in rich history. The Pennacook Indians named the area around the confluence of the Assabet and the Sudbury Rivers to form the Concord River “Musketaquid,” the Algonquin word for a grassy plain. Archeological evidence and oral accounts reveal the importance of the rivers to the nomadic indigenous population, who found the permanent square structures and villages of newly arrived 17th century Europeans impractical. The weight of the American Revolution can be felt by the markers of those who died along the Battle Road in 1775. And a glacial kettle hole known as Walden Pond inspired one of the most notable works of 19th century literary prose by Henry David Thoreau. In fact, his journals and observations have proven invaluable to contemporary scientists studying the effects of a changing climate. 

As a portrait photographer, focusing my camera on the this landscape has been an unexpected and fruitful turn. I find myself looking for figurative gestures in the trees or streams and in the man-made imprints left upon the land. I wish to impart a tenor of solitude that conveys a reverence for the fragile and enduring ecosystems that surround us, and to draw parallels between the cycles of nature and the arc of human history. 

My two sons have been muses to me since their childhood. In recent years, however, they seem to have retreated into their rooms becoming physically and emotionally less available. Turning my camera toward the prosaic and recognizable along with quick glimpses of their bodies and gestures, I search for meaning in the spaces we share, in the objects we have all touched and in their growing bodies. These pictures have eased the tension between the trepidation and elation I feel as my sons grow away and ultimately depart.