Latest Work and News April 2025

An occasional newsletter about recent, current and upcoming work from my studio.

CRUX Photography Research Network

I'm deeply engaged in my Landscape of Inequality project work now, collaborating with a number of my primary school classmates from the 1960s who, like me, lived in upper Yorkville and lower East Harlem. We've been touring and photographing the neighborhoods as they are today and looking through both archival and family photographs and I've been researching changes in the housing and demographic statistics over this period and discussing Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street with Magnum as some of my classmates lived on the street at the time (and had parents who helped Davidson).

Ju Laundry in the early 1960s...

...now a boutique coffee shop

Workshops

Starting in January I participated in a workshop called Light & Ink: Photography and Writing, given by Laura Larson, recommended by Justine Kurland. We explored a number of approaches to combining photography and text with an innovative group of photographers scattered across the country and the globe. Next up, this month I'll be participating in a workshop on Publishing a Photography Book by Harvey Stein at ICP. I'll be attempting to move forward my work on Modern Romance and perhaps looking at Neither Here nor There.

Transitions

In 1994 my father published his best known novel, The Prince of West End Avenue. It is narrated by Otto Korner, a resident of an Upper West Side of New York retirement home engaged in putting on a production of Hamlet. In the course of the novel we learn how, as a younger man in Germany, he refused to recognize the signs of the incipient holocaust. Today we are faced with many of the same signs and the same cognitive dissonance leads us to believe "it can't happen here." I hope to avoid Korner's willful blindness and so we will be returning to England (Brighton) this month with the eyes of potential migrants.

On my blog, obBLOGato, I've been posting pictures of January's travels in southern California since the Martin Luther King Jr Day parade in January in San Diego. Now we're back to my daily peregrinations around New York (at least until we get to Brighton).