Introduction

It was during my graduate studies at Georgetown that I first read an essay by Roland Barthes entitled “The Death of the Author.”  It was a liberating experience for me because it snapped something very important into focus early on in my own writing life: at the end of the day, I would hand over whatever I’d written – whatever I’d intended to write or thought I’d written – and, out of my own metaphorical death, a reader would be born.  The reader would infuse my work with meaning, some kind of distillation of his/her own experiences and proclivities.  Multiple perspectives open the door for multiple meanings, and that’s when the fun starts.

I’m interested in the layers of context a word or image can have for a single person.  I’m interested in the interplay between one individual’s multi-layered experience of something and another person’s equally complex experiential process.  These spontaneous, often fleeting intersections of perspectives are happening all around us, every day — collisions of energy and past, present, and future.

For any photograph I’ve taken, I easily could wrap a story around it —  the sounds, the smells, how I got there, what was happening in my life at the time, who was with me, and the impact such details had on my moment.  Whether taken halfway around the world or in my own backyard, each photograph has personal significance for me specifically because of the context I have to go with it.  The captured image is not my moment, only a souvenir of it.

Here, I’ve decided to share some photographs with you without providing much context at all.  I would rather you have your own moment with each of them.  Enjoy…

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