The Land: Reflections on Photography
In 1968, my father bought an old dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania. Growing up on a farm himself and surviving two European wars, land seemed like a safe and hopeful investment. My husband and I acquired the abandoned farm years later, moving from New York City to raise our family. We restored the house and reforested the land. In the bare fields, I pictured the future as my toddlers grew, and the trees matured.
The land and home serve as a quiet yet strong foundation in my artistic practice. Although they are not obvious subjects, they shape the language, materials, and atmosphere of my work. This property is the stage where identity is both performed and deconstructed. I use a variety of subjects—portraits of families, women, children, along with still lifes of pinecones, food, chocolate, T-shirts, even laundry lint, and cake. The materials carry psychological weight. Their compositions, beauty, and sweetness often mask something more complex. Like in the best fairy tales, the danger lies in the details.
Home is more than just a physical place; it is a psychological space. It is where we learn about love and control, about care and restriction. It serves as a site of nourishment and decay, memory and repression—a landscape shaped by nurture, desire, and inheritance. In my work, I examine this complexity by peeling back surface appearances and exposing the tensions beneath. My compositions, whether still life or portrait, may seem quiet or lush, but they are never neutral. They raise questions about who is seen, who is silenced, and what lies beneath the surface.
Using materials found in my home and studio during lockdown—dissected fruit, folds of blood-red fabric, my niece’s disembodied arm—I created Red Still Life with Blood Orange and Tatiana’s Hand (2020). This scene is both seductive and unsettling. The hand rests delicately, almost reverently, but its separation from the body gives it a trophy-like strangeness. The fruit bleeds. The silk absorbs. The image is richly colored and carefully composed, yet it vibrates with unease. It is not just about beauty; it explores the cost of surface appearances and what we’re willing to ignore in their name.
All my work is made in the fields, forests, and studio of this land. The property is not simply a backdrop; it is a collaborator. It holds memory. Its growth parallels my evolution as an artist: quiet, organic, shaped by seasons, by labor, by silence. The physical act of working the land—digging, planting, waiting—echoes the deeper excavation I do in my images. I am always searching, not just for form or composition, but for something hidden and unspoken.
In my portraits, this search often centers on the gaze. The women and girls I photograph look directly at the viewer. Their expressions are steady, unflinching. They do not perform for the camera; they return its gaze. As critics have noted, they “keep their own counsel.” Their direct eye contact implies not passivity but agency—a conscious decision to engage, to reflect, and to hold space. The viewer is implicated in this exchange. What begins as observation quickly becomes participation. These images are not simply seen—they are felt.
What interests me most is what isn’t said: the elisions in our stories, the emotions that resist articulation. I’m drawn to relationships that exist in tension, to beauty that bruises, to silence that speaks. The land and the home are places where this tension can be safely, even tenderly, examined. They offer a space of return and reflection, but also of reckoning. Through my work, I make that space available.
Over time, the place where I live and work has become a quiet container for the questions I return to. Its solitude, its rhythm, its silence—all offer the conditions I need to think and create. The slow work of tending to the land parallels the slow work of making sense of experience. What takes root here—emotionally, psychologically—finds its way into the pictures. This is not a place of resolution, but of attunement—a place where I can listen more closely to what is not said, to what resists language. The work begins there.
