My first memory is sitting in a hallway with a book in my lap.
Side journeys in my life led me to artmaking of all kinds. I latched onto photography and then came back to books. This time around, I designed my own—made the paper, sewed the bindings, all that.
Death of paper, rise of e-book readers, all that. Yeah I know. I still like to make books.
Whether I’m working with handmade paper and ink or InDesigning and uploading for print-on-demand, I like the challenge and control when I create a book myself.
illustration by SARAH MAZZETTI for The New Yorker
A personal narrative based on interviews, to answer the what and why questions: What is it about the tenor voice? Why does it make such an impact on the audience? What about tenors themselves?
Compiled from 175 in-person interviews plus documentary behind-the-scenes photographs, #TheTenorBook invites the reader to join my unique quest for the answers about an art form that’s evolved and survived for 400 years. Come along – it’s quite a journey.
Still in progress.
1993 – 1997: A group of photographers found an online home in the early days of consumer access to the internet.
We were a group of photographers on the Fine Art Board (FAB) on AOL. Discussions weren’t threaded. People wrote long diatribes, mixing up topics.
I came of age as an artist in this group, and I wasn’t the only one. Casually called THE FAB BOOK, this is our story.
And yes, the misspelling is intentional.
This is about the people who make music. And depending on how you look, it can be a portrait of the music itself.
I made stage shots in a lot of different venues in the mid 1990s, learned a lot about photography. Most of all, I found I wanted to pursue a sense of emotion as a photographer.
The musicians themselves are dedicated to the music, not the celebrity, even when that was part of it. But back then, not all of them were stars. They all knew each other, played backup for each other, had a great time. That joy comes across, through my lens.
A hundred interwoven stories of how opera gets to opening night create a mosaic of this most-collaborative performing art.
My long-term documentary project had some steep learning curves but, trial by fire, it really made me as an artist. Almost two years of daily observation with cameras and journal in rehearsals and backstage gave me the raw material. My original vision had been a lot of photographs with identifying captions, but it evolved – as creative projects do – into a patchwork quilt of stories wrapped around the images.
This book was finished when it went to press, but there was more I needed to explore, and that more turned into Passion & Glory at the Opera.