This portfolio was made possible, in part, by a supporting grant
from the Maine Arts Commission.


My fascination with negative imagery stretches back to my years as a student.
Examining my negatives, with a loupe on a light table, I felt as if I was glimpsing
another world. The radiant image was beautiful and strange, hyper-real and surreal.
A bridge, perhaps, between the visible and the invisible.

Now, many years later, my interest in negative imagery has only deepened. For the
past six years, I have been working “in the negative,” making prints and creating
series of works.  I approach my photographic prints as a painter approaches a
canvas. For the past 15 years, I have been hand-painting my photographs,
selectively colorizing parts of an image, and combining a black and white world with
a versicolored world. This instinct to interact with my prints is at the heart of my work,
conceptually and technically – the exploration of the marriage of painting to
photography, and black and white imagery to colored imagery. Painting on
photographs allows for both a meditation on an image and a re-interpretation of that
which was recorded initially. In this regard, the photographic image, negative or
positive, black and white or colored, is solely a springboard, or a point of departure.

My photographs of children are intimate, spontaneous moments from my life with
my 12 year-old child and other children in our community, focusing on those who
are 3 - 8 years old. This is the period in a child’s development that most interests
me, (and the one that conceptually mirrors the technical aspects of my prints), as
the children are so forcefully awake and unmasked, exploring and discovering their
inner and outer worlds, and feeling and displaying raw, uncensored emotion. I hope
to illuminate something fragile and poignant, something that lies beneath the
surface of the photographic print. Ultimately, I hope to create a unique and elusive
image: One of both clarity and mystery, both intimately familiar and utterly foreign.  
A perfect metaphor for a child’s world, and for the impermanence of that world.