Housing Works:

I went to the 9th Street Housing Works Residence and Adult Day Care Heath Program  two or three times a week, with my Rolleiflex, light-meter, a dozen rolls of color and black and white film, offering free portraits to previously homeless people living with HIV and AIDS. I never left there with unused film. 

These portraits are collaborations. I never thought of myself as an author while taking these photographs. I am not suggesting that these are staged performances; rather every portrait is a representation of a person, not a story. Many of the residents sent my prints to family members or close friends as gifts to preserve that moment.  

There is something enigmatic about a portrait. Contemporary portraits often miss what the first historical photographic portraits expressed. The aesthetic and tools have changed, and the gravitas is lacking. Modern works lack the serious intent of early photographs and the photograph’s permanence and value. Daguerreotypes and early portraits were grounded in the laborious set up of large cameras, in the long exposure required, and in the one-of-a kind image produced after meticulous processing. But I have learned from my experience at Housing Works other ways to recapture what is special and valuable about the portrait: an active way to access what is not always explicit and what cannot be expressed by other methods.  

It’s also a fact that portraits of marginalized people hanging in galleries and on walls do little to challenge the systems that shunt them aside. These people remain invisible. I tried therefore to address social policies and the ignorance that make these residents at Housing Works “invisible.” 

And they very much wanted to be visible. As I discussed the portraits with the residents, politics was always a topic: their politicization after diagnosis, their struggles with bureaucracy and their search for real meaning in their lives. While part of the photographs, the politics do not dominate.   Rather the residents put their imprimatur on the public space around them, by choosing time, place, pose and attire.  These photographs do not “show” previously homeless people, IV users, drug addicts, alcoholics, or people with AIDS.   Indeed, the residents and I wanted to give value to these images by combating media stereotypes. They deserve a beautiful picture of themselves. But of course these portraits do not – they cannot -- mask the great suffering of AIDS and homelessness.  

Many decided to be photographed near plants or in the community garden where Keith Cylar, a co-founder of Housing Works, and other members of the community are buried. These choices form a testament to the strong sense of community of the 9^th Street residence.

Home:

Home is a concept I grapple with daily, as I live equidistant to my parents and siblings in San Francisco, and my grandparents who live in France. This series in ongoing and does not attempt to be cohesive. It is merely an exploration of what seems intimate but appears insignificant to the public.

Synagogues -- Spiritual Spaces. Abandoned, Created, or Private:

This photography project, perhaps along with tapes of music, prayer, and/or discussion, explores Jewish spirituality of the masses -- beginning with spirituality in old, abandoned New York synagogues and other places of historical/religious importance to Jews in New York, as well as places where Jews re-discover their roots, rituals or religious spirit.

191 East 2nd Street:

After my second year of college I moved out of the dormitories and landed in the East Village, a neighborhood that was rapidly changing. A member of the gentrifying community, I sought to illustrate and explore the new and old of east 2nd street. I began to photograph all the apartments in my building, looking at the spaces as portraits of New Yorkers,

Santa Fe:

Much like my photographs of home, these photographs are but moments from the summer of 2005, when I worked at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. I miss the great skies, grasshoppers and silence of the south west.

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