Photographs from a time of loss

This exhibition of photographs emerged from the most difficult time in my life. In 2020 my husband of many years fell ill. I went through years of desperation and revival – moments when his death seemed inevitable and others when I found hope, love that I needed to share with him. At the time when Fausto lay dying in a New York hospital, I would sit with him for hours. The work I did then, photographs of the city as it appeared, often through the opaque shades in his room, came as an absolute spiritual necessity.

These photographs registered agony and horror at this terminus of his life and mine, the desolation of being removed from everything that made existence good. But to find consolation, I would often take walks – mostly along the coast or in the woods near where we lived in Huntington – that inspired a different kind of photography. Here I would compose visual poems from nature for my husband, hoping to inspire the strength of hope in him.

These two extremes have found expression in my current work, what you see today. The photographs from both of that difficult moment’s series are here composed to serve as meditations on the proximity of desolation and consolation, despair and hope.