Natural Histories
.... you and the place you are from are not a chance encounter; it is something beyond destiny, it is something so meant to be that it is beyond words.
From Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of my Mother
I grew up along the banks of a small stream in the Chagrin River valley of Ohio. My woodland romantic father and my landscape painter grandfather took my siblings and me on long walks along the streambed. Our explorations were slow and quiet meanders, as my father proclaimed the joys of looking at the natural world we passed through. On these walks I learned to love being in nature.
The works presented here are about this love affair. Family and home intertwined with the natural world. The home of my childhood are where my photographs come from. All the images I make now, no matter where I am, have their roots in the woods and stream of Novelty, Ohio.
I suspect, as Jamaica Kincaid has so beautifully written, that we will never know a place as we know the place we are from. This work is about coming to know that.
