I began a dedicated practice in photography and digital media in 2020 after a long career as a professor of Japanese culture and cinema at Middlebury College. My images touch on our lost connections to the past and the natural world. I try to find the space between the timelessness of a subject and the reality of its particular moment. I am drawn to the defamiliarizing quality of photos from an earlier era to recover for myself a sense of the immediacy of the medium when it was less pervasive. I am currently experimenting with autobiographical and diaristic themes in photomontages using family photos, old Kodak negatives, and text.

The lens conspires with light and atmosphere to bring something unexpected to the photographic process — an emotionality beneath the contours of the visible. Photographs capture a moment only to remind us it is gone forever. There is a word for this phenomenon in Japanese: miren, meaning a feeling of lingering attachment for a lost time. Miren is one of the guiding principles of my work. My first serious dive into photography was as a student in Tokyo in the 1970s. I learned the importance of visual aesthetics but also something more ephemeral — a sense that a camera can intimately connect us to others, our surroundings, and ourselves.

I aspire to the dynamic balance in the frame compositions of film directors Ozu and Kurosawa, and to the cerebral subtlety of photographers Hiroshi Sugimoto and Rinko Kawauchi. I have also found inspiration in the forms and tonality of ukiyo-e prints, sumi-e drawing, and Nihon-ga genre painting.The natural beauty that surrounds my rural home in Vermont is a constant source of solace and wonder, as the turn of each season reveals a new palette and refreshed quality of light.

Juried and Invited Group Exhibitions

Portrait: Self and Others, PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, VT, May 3 - May 24, 2024. Juror, Aline Smithson (Cousins)

In the Periphery, Light Factory Photo Arts Center, Charlotte, NC, April 20 - May 13, 2024. Juror, Brittani Taylor (Imprint)

Daydreams and Night Lights, Radiant Aberration and zoneFIVE Gallery, Colorado Springs, CO, October 6 - November 30, 2023. Juror, Sandra Klein (Forbid My Tears)

Water Is Sacred, ACCI Gallery, Berkeley, CA, September 1 - October 8, 2023. Juror, Susanna Lamaina (Hold Off the Earth Awhile and Weeping Brook)

TPS 31: The International Competition, Texas Photographic Society,  Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery, The University of Texas Permian Basin, Odessa, Texas, August 28 - October 6, 2023. Juror: Charlotte Cotton (Swimmer’s Dream)

Permaculture: Art of the Natural World, Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, ID, August 19 - October 29, 2023. Juror: Jo Banister (Two works selected: Next Big Step and New Frontier)

Solar, Pour-d Gallery, Rockford, MI. June 17 - September 1, 2023. Juror, Tree Anderson (Two works selected: Peaches on Green and Morning Sunlight)

Innovations 2023 the 32nd Annual International Open Juried Exhibition, International Society of Experimental Artists, Cultural Center of Cape Cod, South Yarmouth, MA, September 12 - October 7, 2023. Jurors, Nancy Barch, Lia Rothstein (Nefertiti at the Apocalypse)

Completely Color, Inter-Society Color Council, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, June 11 - 15, 2023. Jurors, Mark Fairchild, Danielle Siembieda-Gribben (Deconstructed Poppy)

Flower Power, CORE Art Space Gallery, Lakewood, CO, May 12 - 29, 2023. Juror, Michael Paglia (Iris)

Spark! Fueling a Love of Birds, Birds of Vermont Museum, Huntington, VT, May 1 - October 31, 2023. Juror, Kir Talmadge  (New Spirit)