I’ve always had the wanderlust.  As a child, I would come home from school, get my dog and wander the then still rural hills of Bryn Mawr.  As an adult, traveling by plane, car, or freighter, I circled the globe.  It was all fascinating, but it wasn’t until I stepped onto the balcony of a hotel room in Cairo and looked down at the Nile that I found the part of the world I would continually return to, that I felt at home in, and that I ultimately fell in love with.

 

Through all my travels, I had a camera; at first a very basic point-and-shoot, eventually a Canon SLR.  While not immune to the beauty of landscape and buildings, it was what was going on in the streets that captured my imagination, particularly when what was going on was part of a less-modernized world.  My photos of San’a include one of two old men sitting together companionably outside a mosque; another is of the  local letter writer, using a cardboard carton as a desk with a client squatting beside him.  While Yemen, like all the countries of the Middle East that I visited, was in the process of modernizing, what I wanted to capture was an earlier Arabia: Arabia as it was.

 

At some point I realized that the streets of my now home, Tucson, were also  rich in photographic material.  Several years ago, I spent many weekend mornings wandering around downtown with my camera.  I ended up with a collection of photographs I called The Face of Homelessness.  When I revisited these pictures recently, I thought the backgrounds of the photos often distracted from the subjects, many of whom had wonderful faces – compelling, naked and devoid of social facade.  Using Photoshop, I replaced the background with black, shifting the focus of the picture from the story to the person.