The essays below reflect my deep past, my darkest, bleakest hours and my struggle to hold onto hope. That fine silk thread of hope is the reason that I am here today. I would never change my past, it has shaped me into the human that I am today. I am and will always be grateful. I feel that I suffered through decades of PTSD, and only in these past few years have I even begun to turn the worm and redirect my life. Am I too sensitive? Yes. Am I too vulnerable? Yes. Am I too hard on myself? Yes. I will always feel that I have never given back enough, never created enough awareness and all for good reason. I've always been able to step onto a plane and leave. Behind me rests my past, I share it, simply to inform the present.  

BELFAST + APARTHEID

Belfast, Northern Ireland and Apartheid South Africa have been inexorably joined since my boots first hit the pavement of the real world in the winter of 1987. In Belfast, I met many who self identified with the struggle of those living under and through Apartheid. One of the many murals during my time in Belfast, depicted Nelson Mandela and his fellow South Africans struggle for equality and freedom. The bleak oppression, the class and racial discrimination, the violence, the fear all simmered together in the same cauldron.

 

 

AIDS + FAMINE

Darfur and my AIDS story were literally seven days apart. Opposite ends of the world and opposite ends of my soul. I found myself wrung dry in terms of my already broken soul. Seeing the same ravaged bodies through the needle of my eye left my soul in ashes. More profoundly powerful women and men were there to take them across the river of life with a dignity and courage I could never possess. 

 

 

AFTER THE FALL: EL SALVADOR + ROMANIA

Romania was a kaleidoscopic experience in the mid 90’s. I worked three stories: children with AIDS, a story on oil and then an essay on the homeless children living in the train station by day and the underground sewers by night. It was a tough country to work back then. I was arrested twice,  kicked out of my hotel, kicked out of a restaurant and had film confiscated.  It felt as if the weight of the country rested on each individuals shoulders. My goal was to shoulder that weight in an attempt to deeply understand what her people were living through. Of course I never could. El Salvador was another country in pieces, shredded, broken from the outside unlike Romania who broke from within. To arrive into a country of devastation, in such deep crisis is overwhelming. Millions of people had lost everything in a matter of seconds. They had lost their family, their home, their livelihood and they were scared, hungry, thirsty, and needing medical attention all at the same time. A camera is the worst thing to have in my hands at times, when all people need is unconditional love, empathy, reassurance and a kind soul to understand them.

 

 

RWANDA + SARAJEVO

Rwanda and Sarajevo took me over the precipice and left me there. Price of admission is something I’ll spend the rest of my life never getting over. My negatives will confirm that, my words, my memories and all the photographs I didn’t make. The toughest decisions in my life were both made in these countries. Both were about overcoming fear, my own. Confronting genocide, pushing up against everything I thought I knew about humanity, about myself. I felt I literally had to start my life over, because nothing ever could or would be the same ever again.

 

 

LEGACY WAR: ISRAEL + VIETNAM 

I laid down the camera’s here in Israel. I’d obliterated the edge. Journalists were a 1/2 mile away in flak jackets and steel helmets, I was a foot away with nothing. Completely vulnerable was the only way in. As a photographer, I only bled from within. I was a master of concealment. Until the rooms of Agent Orange took me down under, down under the veil of the Vietnam War. Hidden ghosts from the afterlife surrounded me, swallowing me down into their world. Image after image are folded onto my negatives, until I find myself in tears behind my camera. I am broken. I leave their room, and for the first time in my career, I enter the room without my cameras. I embrace the light in their beautiful souls and I am now free.