Bodies of work

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to places where life happens in public.

Market towns. Main Streets. Village greens. Town squares.

Places where errands become conversations. Where food, commerce, art, music, friendship, and daily life intermingle naturally. Places where people encounter one another not because they planned to, but because they share a community.

For years, I’ve felt a kind of longing for those spaces. Not out of nostalgia, but because they seem increasingly rare.

Every Sunday, a temporary town square appears. Farmers arrive early. Bakers unload bread. Musicians set up. Children run between tents. Neighbors stop to talk. Strangers become familiar faces. Food becomes an excuse for connection.

As market manager of the Beacon Farmers’ Market, documenting this place has always been part of my work. I photograph vendors, vegetables, musicians, customers, weather, celebrations, and ordinary moments because helping to build a community also means helping people see it.

But over time, I began noticing something else.

In a world increasingly shaped by outrage, critique, and fragmentation, I found myself instinctively drawn toward images of offering.

A farmer extending a bunch of carrots.

A cheesemaker holding a wheel of cheese close to her chest.

An arm full of flowers.

A hand reaching across a table.

Again and again, I found myself making photographs that emphasized connection rather than conflict, abundance rather than scarcity, and participation rather than isolation.

This is not because hardship is absent. Anyone who works in agriculture understands uncertainty, exhaustion, weather, economics, and risk. But photography, for me, has become a practice of selective attention. A way of asking what happens when we deliberately notice what is working. What is beautiful. What is generous. What is alive.

The photographs in Bodies of Work emerged from that impulse.

I found myself cropping out faces and moving closer to the body. Hands. Arms. Torsos. Gestures. The physical places where labor lives.

Without faces, the images become less about individual identity and more about a collective human experience. They draw attention to the bodies that harvest, carry, lift, arrange, prepare and offer. They invite viewers to consider food not as a commodity, but as the visible expression of care, effort and devotion.

Again and again, I noticed food being held close to the body — pressed against the chest, resting in the crook of an arm, gathered in two hands. It began to feel as though the food and the body were extensions of one another. Labor made visible. Nourishment made tangible.

The Hudson Valley has long been shaped by both art and agriculture. Both require patience. Both are acts of making. Both ask us to see possibility where others might not.

In many ways, this work is an extension of that belief.

I do not think photography simply documents reality. I think it frames it.

And in a culture where cynicism often feels louder than wonder, I have become increasingly interested in using the frame to redirect attention — to beauty, to labor, to community, to abundance, and to the small acts of offering through which we continually rebuild our shared world.

These photographs are not simply about food.

They are about belonging.

They are about what becomes visible when we choose to look for what is still good.

Exhibit opening reception: Sat. July 11, 4–7pm

On View: July 11 – August 1

Location: Super Secret Projects
484 Main Street (behind shop)
Beacon, NY

A portion of proceeds from the exhibition will support food access initiatives and SNAP-related food benefit programs connected to the Beacon Farmers’ Market.