In my photography, I explore how we live and develop culture within the natural world and how we influence that world. I look at the ways that the environment, both the natural and the built, help to create our individual experiences of reality, as well as the ways in which family and culture affect the individual. In creating this work, I hope to suggest how our physical and social environment influences our deepest inner experiences.
My photographs have been exhibited in art, history and botanic museums and galleries; it is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, Harvard Art Museum, the Polaroid Collection, and the Eaton Vance Collection, among others. Several significant awards have helped support my practice and recognized my work; twice my work was awarded with an Artist’s Fellowship in Photography by the Massachusetts Cultural Council; other grants and awards have come from the Artadia Dialogue for Art and Culture, the Polaroid Foundation, and The New England Foundation for the Arts. My books, Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens (2010) and One Family (2001) have earned awards from the Garden Writers Association and the Magazine Association for the Southeast.
I live and work in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Prince Edward Island, Canada. I am Associate Professor Emerita at Simmons University, where I taught photography for twenty years.