These photographs are from Home in The World, an ongoing series of my twins Sammy and Ava as they grow from childhood into adolescence.. I’ve been working on this series since 2020. The pictures are made both from quiet observation and staging an idea. Ava is ever the defiant one, with her own emerging unease, constantly pushing boundaries. Sammy is curious, affectionate and still held in childhood.
The pictures are also about bearing witness to these two souls as they find and build meaning in the idea of “home”: a home in their developing bodies and spirit, and the home they see and make in the world. A world that, even under the best of circumstances, now feels ever more tenuous and fragile. Just over a year ago the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning. According to a March 23, 2023 New York Times article, Murthy stated health challenges were leading to “devastating effects'' among young people. The suicide rate for young Americans ages 10 to 19 jumped by 40 percent from 2001 to 2019, while emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 88 percent. Murthy called this “the defining public health crisis of our time,” I obsess over these horrifying statistics as Sammy and Ava hover over the precipice of adolescence. I photograph their changes both in body and spirit, and I wonder, ‘how will they weather the coming storm?’
Art is inextricably tied to daily life. We do not have to make or consider it to stay alive and yet it feels profoundly urgent during these times. The poet, William Carlos Williams’ dictate, “No Ideas but In Things' ' resonates deeply with me. The investigation (and the wonder) of how a subject can be transformed in a photograph is one that I am in continual pursuit. This truth about photography’s alchemy, its ability to describe the physical world is the very center of why I make photographs.
Emmet Gowin spoke of his family pictures as if they "were coming to me from life itself"; so my work aspires to express both the deepest intimacy of family life, the ephemeral exquisiteness of childhood and the current angst of contemporary American adolescence. Since there is little separation between my subjects and myself, the conflict between "the intensely seeing eye" and the mothering eye, requires that I work with heightened intention. It is not that I make my strongest work in spite of being a mother but because of this truth.
