Documentary Photographer and Photojournalist
There are many expressive ways of narrating history.
My instinct as a photojournalist has always been to find the story
that is at the heart of every project. I look to the deeply etched
memories in the stones, structures and sites with the same passion
that I look to the defining gesture and moment of truth that makes
each portrait and documentary essay unique.
In August 2008 I traveled
to the Ukraine for the first time, to visit Odessa, the birthplace
of my father. My two-week visit became an exploration into the history
of the once vast community of Eastern European Jews and the relics
they had left behind. I could see hundreds of stones, jutting out
of the hills in all directions, leaning this way and that like silent
figures pushing out toward the sun. In the distance the worn grey,
beige and brown graves appeared as stark monuments and reminders
of the people who had lived their lives in these places, and died.
During 2005-2006, as part of an international team of media professionals
for InSIGHT Out! a creative workshop and cultural exchange program,
I taught digital photography and storytelling workshops to children
affected by the 2004 Asian Tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia and Phang
Nga, Thailand.
In 1996 I traveled to Myanmar (Burma) to document human rights abuses
under the ruling junta's military dictatorship, the spread of HIV/AIDS,
and to meet with pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel
peace laureate after she was released from prison (1989-1995).
In 1984 I went to the Philippines to photograph the economic, social
and political conditions that contributed to the civil war during
the Marcos dictatorship. I returned many times over twenty years,
and produced photo-essays about the indigenous people of the Cordillera
Mountains, as well as the farmers, sugar workers, peasants, and rebel
soldiers on the islands of Luzon, Mindanao and Negros.
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