About
I have been making photographs for more than thirty years while maintaining a full-time practice (until recently) as a psychologist/psychoanalyst. Not surprisingly, these two paths of my life are intricately interwoven. Both require careful looking -- seeing into -- through a lens or a viewpoint. Both welcome the associations that arrive unbidden and the possibility of a dialogue with what might have been unconscious or difficult to know. And in both, I am looking to put into place and to make sense of something I had not previously known.
I look through my lens and listened to patients with a somewhat similar goal: to discover what has not been seen or to find a newer and better way to see it.
I am fascinated by how we see, what we see and do not see, as well as the meaning and origin of what we think we see. Illustrating and playing with these ideas was my goal in creating the exhibition Route 22.
Because photography was historically believed to illustrate an objective reality, people often ask, "What is that?," as if there were an object of reference. My answer is usually, "What comes to mind?," thereby encouraging them to forget the name, to play, to dream -- to lose themselves in the possibility of the spaces they see.
In the image to the right, a covering obscures or protects what lies beneath, but we do not immediately know what we see. Here, the Swedish Royal Palace in Stockholm has been wrapped for heavy cleaning with a construction netting that protected passersby from falling debris. Yes, we see a netting and a facade, but we might also see an image where light and dark shapes move rhythmically, musically, in harmonious patterns.
I have studied photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Barbara Crane and Joyce Neimanis and in workshops nationally (the late Fred Picker, James Maher) and internationally (Etienne Bossot of Pics of Asia). My work has been exhibited in New York, Arizona, California, and Chicago, often in a psychoanalytic conference space, and is represented in several private collections.
I am a member of Perspective Group and Photography Gallery in Evanston, Illinois, where I had my first show in 2019. I will have a second in February 2021. I live in Evanston, Illinois. (August 2020)
