Artist Statement
2011
In 2011, I took my second photography class at the School of the Art Institute with my second amazing teacher. In that class, we were taught to write "artist statements." I had retired one year earlier. Here is what I wrote then about this project:
The photograph is not a relationship; it is a document of a relationship. And the subject of the photograph is seeing the photographer as much as the photographer is seeing her subject.
I went to the Greyhound Bus Station because I wanted to make photographs of people. What I thought was that people would be sitting and waiting there, as I had once some forty-odd years ago, and that they might be willing subjects. What did not occur to me was that I was lonely in my new life, and that I needed badly to connect with people. I was a civil rights lawyer in a large office. My office door was always open. If I wanted human contact, there were other people only feet away. In my new life , I am alone most of the time. As it happened, I believe I shared the need for human contact with many of the people at the Greyhound Bus Station. However brief my relationships were with the people there, the connections were fulfilling to me. We exchanged stories. I felt close to people. And for that time, they took away my loneliness.
What the subjects of my work told me was important information that I had never before heard firsthand. A young man from Englewood in Chicago was moving to Iowa not because he wanted to but because “Chicago’s too hard.” A novitiate sat reading a book about Mother Theresa and was entering a silent order. A young man with a teardrop tattoo, who stuttered and tended to repeat himself, had spent most of his time in prison since he was eighteen “I wish they would have let me stay,” he said. “I only get in trouble when I’m out.” A distinguished-looking man with a briefcase opened it, and there was nothing inside but a toothbrush. An itinerant shipbuilder who had been staying with his sister was reading a book by Stephen Hawking – for the second time. All of this interaction made the experience highly emotional.
The Greyhound Bus Station became a special place to me. It was a refuge of sorts. When the benches were rearranged, I felt uprooted, as if something I counted on had been lost. However fleeting my relationships were with the subjects of my photographs, these portraits are my attempt to reveal the person I came to know. Perhaps, though, the reality I wanted was not -- as I thought at the time, the person as if I wasn’t there, but rather the person in relationship to me, looking at me or not. Despite my request that my subjects not “pose” for the pictures, it is not surprising that in some of the best ones, the persons are looking right at me.
The photograph is not a relationship; it is a document of a relationship. And the subject of the photograph is seeing the photographer as much as the photographer is seeing her subject.
I went to the Greyhound Bus Station because I wanted to make photographs of people. What I thought was that people would be sitting and waiting there, as I had once some forty-odd years ago, and that they might be willing subjects. What did not occur to me was that I was lonely in my new life, and that I needed badly to connect with people. I was a civil rights lawyer in a large office. My office door was always open. If I wanted human contact, there were other people only feet away. In my new life , I am alone most of the time. As it happened, I believe I shared the need for human contact with many of the people at the Greyhound Bus Station. However brief my relationships were with the people there, the connections were fulfilling to me. We exchanged stories. I felt close to people. And for that time, they took away my loneliness.
What the subjects of my work told me was important information that I had never before heard firsthand. A young man from Englewood in Chicago was moving to Iowa not because he wanted to but because “Chicago’s too hard.” A novitiate sat reading a book about Mother Theresa and was entering a silent order. A young man with a teardrop tattoo, who stuttered and tended to repeat himself, had spent most of his time in prison since he was eighteen “I wish they would have let me stay,” he said. “I only get in trouble when I’m out.” A distinguished-looking man with a briefcase opened it, and there was nothing inside but a toothbrush. An itinerant shipbuilder who had been staying with his sister was reading a book by Stephen Hawking – for the second time. All of this interaction made the experience highly emotional.
The Greyhound Bus Station became a special place to me. It was a refuge of sorts. When the benches were rearranged, I felt uprooted, as if something I counted on had been lost. However fleeting my relationships were with the subjects of my photographs, these portraits are my attempt to reveal the person I came to know. Perhaps, though, the reality I wanted was not -- as I thought at the time, the person as if I wasn’t there, but rather the person in relationship to me, looking at me or not. Despite my request that my subjects not “pose” for the pictures, it is not surprising that in some of the best ones, the persons are looking right at me.
