Being Old
The pictures in this series do not portray what we hope old age will be for us. They were made in the Alzheimer’s ward of an assisted living facility. Most of the residents were lost in their disease. Only those were afraid who found their way back from time to time.
Chabad
The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim of orthodox Judaism believe that one good deed can transform the world and each new day may bring a blessing. Their philosophy—from which the term 'Chabad' derives—teaches that wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, as well as emotion, connect human beings to God.
Chabad communities exist in hundreds of cities around the world. These pictures were made in Houston, Texas; Hobart, Indiana; Miami, Florida; and Detroit, Michigan.
Covenant
Covenant traces five years in the life of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in downtown Indianapolis. Starting this documentary I knew little about this world and had few points of reference to guide me through it. What I discovered at Friendship was a community of individuals whose struggles against life’s vagaries were altered by the shared vision of a perfect world beyond this one and sealed by a covenant they believe will lead them safely into it.
Damage
Since 2004 I have worked on this series of vexed landscapes, at first in color, later in black and white. The places are common and rarely win our attention. But these pictures do not want to be epic. Nor in the ordinary ways of a documentary do they mean to draw us to sympathy or action. Rather, they hope to point quietly toward particular sorrows: the unease of our relations with the things we see around us but do not mark, the cost to wholeness when we are blind to the details of place, the failure of a creative imagination that even such marginal environments as these bring to mind.
Family, Friends, and Others
Looking at one of these pictures, a friend asked me about the person in it: name, biography, traits, et cetera. It’s a question about portraiture that for me is off the mark. A portrait doesn’t offer enough of the evidence we need to know a particular person: The camera sees to that. For me, the interesting questions that camera portraits ask have to do with the unquiet relationships that exist between the photographer and subject and between the photograph and viewer.
High Risk
The subjects of these portraits are teenagers expelled for disciplinary reasons from their inner-city high schools. As such they became eligible to attend an alternative education program devoted to the special needs of these high-risk students. The pictures were made in their classrooms and on field trips.
‘High risk’ refers here to students whose academic and behavioral problems at school were chronic and critical. Rarely was this the result of the students’ intellects. Rather, beneath these symptoms of failure lay social, familial, and personal issues that left these teenagers in danger of dropping out of school and thus intensifying their lifelong experiences of deprivation, alienation, crime, and violence.
On one hand the portraits describe young people who are at high risk of slipping through the gaps in our social support networks. On the other they record the faces of survivors.
Por Siempre
While I was photographing in Cuba, in one of Santa Clara’s poorer barrios, a toothless, white-haired man appeared in a doorway across the street and began running toward me, his arms raised and fists clenched, yelling something I couldn’t understand. I first feared he was offended by my presence. Much nearer now, I understood his meaning. To my surprised delight, I realized he was crying out “por siempre, amigos por siempre.” Friends forever. It was an offering to a stranger of friendship and peace.
The Last Refuge of Disillusion
The writer Leonard Woolf described a garden as ‘the last refuge of disillusion.’ The land I live on—where I resolve each spring to be a gardener and relearn every fall that I am not—is increasingly where I look for signs that life matters.
Twilight in Arcadia
In 1998 the Indiana Historical Society commissioned me to document the culture of tobacco growing in southern Indiana. The pictures were to focus on the activities of one farm, which many locals described as the largest tobacco growing enterprise in the state. For one year, I covered each phase of the process, from the planting of seeds through the sale of bundled leaves at auction.
But it was the community of Hispanic migrant workers I met on the farm who gave me what I needed to find meaning in the project. What I learned opened my eyes to a vexed patchwork of oddly intertwined lives, to prejudice, confusion, neglect, a dream of the good life, and a tale of abiding injustice.