I am a photojournalist and portrait photographer.  As a photojournalist, I am drawn to indigenous cultures.  I want to record ways of life that are rapidly disappearing, and in the process explore the visual relationship of customs and ethnic dress to nature and to the history of the culture. Balance in composition is important to me. I look for elegance of line, for graceful gestures, for patterns. The same compositional concerns apply to my portrait work where I look for ways to evoke the mystery of a subject through expression, pose and  relationship to background.  I am particularly interested in photographing writers and artists.  There is always something at work in the eyes of the creative mind, and I like discovering what it is.

 

I started my career as a photojournalist in 1969. For the following nine years I photographed in China, Iran, East Africa, India and Europe, was published in numerous newspapers and magazines, and was represented by Black Star. I stopped working professionally from 1978 to 1988 when my children were small. When I resumed my career, I concentrated on portraits. Over the years I have developed a specialty of author portraits and have worked for most publishing houses in New York and London. I resumed photojournalism in 1997 and started writing travel articles to accompany my photographs. My travel articles have been published in The New York Times, Travel and Leisure and The Traveller. Since 2006 I have been working on The Second Half, a study that documents in portraits and interviews the ways the second half of life is experienced by women from many cultures.