My body of work is both an exploration of light and a documentation of tension.  I’ve been going to Sanibel Island since before I was born, and have been photographing it for as long as I can remember.  Sanibel’s real beauty lies in its inextinguishable light – both the literal phenomenon of light’s behavior in the dynamic environment of a barrier island, and its metaphorical opportunities.  I’m interested in the natural tensions of that place, which is ecologically volatile, and lies on an intense boundary of human-nature interaction.  Its unique light is the narrative coherence uniting all these natural tensions and volatilities, and also the metaphorical vehicle for the relationship between me and my mother.  But my images have somehow never caught-up with the naturalistic and emotional potential of that place.  And that’s what I want to do with my project.

I plan to execute this project by shooting on location three times over the course of this quarter with the use of a medium format camera, using black and white film.  My goal for completion of this project is to print ten (size, yet to be determined) images on warm toned, glossy fiber based archival paper.

My family of origin, so to speak, as well as my husband and children, have significantly influenced my work in the past decade.  The family I grew up in was an intensely colorful, albeit quietly yet very obviously flawed, tapestry begun by my Cuban refugee father and runaway Navy brat mother, both of whom were their own keepers of a complicated narrative.  I’m also the younger sister of a severely disabled and disfigured brother, whose scarred face and body have always been his primary narrative.  Through animated story telling, and an amateur interest in photography, my father painstakingly imparted to us the importance of familial documentation, and an archival orientation towards the world.  My mother was keeper of all things beautiful.  Her life, and early death, taught me to see beauty in many contexts, both obvious and unimaginable.  As a child, I sometimes wondered why God gave such a beautiful woman such an ugly baby.  So frightening and confusing was my brother’s appearance, that very early on I trained myself to look beyond it, almost through him, straight to his heart, his truth, his real beauty.  Through my visual arts education, I learned how to create an image that was neither conventionally beautiful, nor political, nor gratuitous, but simply tried to be an honest account of human experience.  When my mother, the center of our universe, died, I felt like all the beauty in my world, and moreover, my ability to see it, had been extinguished.  It took the birth of my first child, Alessandra, five years later, to feel like that gift had returned to me, and since then I have been obsessively photographing my family and Sanibel.

I’m also strongly influenced by the work of Clyde Butcher, Chris Rainier, and Sebastiao Salgado, for both their artistic brilliance and their ability to use photography as a social tool.  All three photographers imbue their work with a spiritualism that is inextricably linked to the natural environment, and their genius (to me) lies in using that naturalism to tell a deep, multi-dimensional human story.

My work aspires to convey the connectedness that we all share, with each other and with our natural environment.  One of my favorite photos is of my brother, David, taken by a Miami Herald staff photographer.  In it, my brother’s face appears in the hands of the surgeon who, for sixteen years, meticulously tried to reconstruct his face.  Even at the age of twelve, its narrative simplicity really resonated with me.  My brother’s horrifically scarred face became a thing of beauty in the hands of its master craftsman.  In this single image, the photographer was able to convey the emotional connectedness between doctor and patient, as well as subject and audience…his camera became an instrument of the heart, connecting all of us.

Sanibel has always been a family place for me, and my work there is based on a profoundly personal dialogue between my mother and me.  Its physical geography, the aspect of its humidity-hazed light, and its place as a flashpoint of human-nature contact make it the right narrative substrate for my work.