PHOT 709, Post #1

Most recently, I've been working on two different portfolios: documenting endangered cultures, primarily in Namibia and Tanzania and shooting Sanibel Island's landscape.  All of my Africa work is shot, in color, digitally; whereas, Sanibel is in black and white, film.  For the purposes of PHOT 709, I'd like to continue with the latter...

Sanibel Island is a family place for me; it’s where my mother took us when I was a child, and where I take my own children as an adult.  Since my mother’s death, the light on Sanibel has taken on a spiritual dimension to me.  She suffered from bi-polarity, and could at times be unpredictably terrifying, and then, almost in the same moment, emit the most brilliant warmth and light.  The island’s thunderstorms are like that, black and pelting, then blinding light a moment later.  My mom’s spirit envelops and permeates Sanibel … like an impossibly thin layer of water, ebbing and flowing around a moon jelly; like the glimmering sunlight on the retreating tidal flow, the water segmented like plates on a sea turtle’s shell; like the voluminous cloudscape that surrounds the island every afternoon, metaphor for making something out of nothing; like the divinely placed shadow amongst a flock of gulls; like the beautifully isolated mangrove, so resolved and determined to remain rooted in her oyster bed; and like the weather worn trees of Cayo Costa.  They have another life, those old trees.  Their curvaceous womb-wood makes windows and composition, becomes sculptural.  But mostly she’s the light and water, those reagents of reflection.  Sanibel allows my mom and me the sacred space to continue to be in dialogue with one another, and for those conversations to manifest themselves through the images I capture.