About

With the little Kodak Brownie camera in hand, I was off to the world of photography in the 1970’s! Too young to photograph the events of the American War in Vietnam and its protests, or the rise of equal rights for women and the ongoing civil rights changes with organized bussing, as I was just a grade schooler at the time, I remember a story my mother shared and oh, how I longed to have photographed it! So, in my mind’s eye, the picture is etched like stone—she, being white, and her good friend Loraine, being black, stood in that old downtown floor to ceiling window of Louisville’s Heyburn Building. In crisp white x-ray technology uniforms, they stood shoulder to shoulder peering down at the militant parade on Broadway down below. Black Panthers facing off against the white protestors and the KKK.

Up above, Mona and Loraine stared down at the complexity of it all. The window muffled the far away noises of shouting humans with angry faces, pushing and pulling at one another. The dreadful scene repeated upon, not just our town, but in cities across our great country. A darkness to this day eternally burns, more or less, less or more.

“Maybe it’s not safe for us to be standing in the window like this,” one of them said to the other. So, from their vantage point overlooking Broadway, the two professional women retreated, and the great city street became but one more story in a saga that still continues to this day—not because of the difference of a person’s skin color, but because chaos is a money-maker.

I never did jockey for the frontline shot of the frontline. In fact, my photography world drew me to the complete opposite. Photographing people appealed to me, but my true love has been and continues to be photographing nature.

It is in nature that I find myself about.

It is in nature that I leave my work-a-day world of being a licensed clinical social worker to become peace and calm of photographing the prairie wind on bright yellow canola in the heart of Canada or photographing a St. Kitts clothesline that whips and dries batik cloth ready for dresses, of which I have one.

Being a photographer and being a published photographer are two different things. The latter, unfortunately, eluded me. I have not been interested in making a living by my photographs, but I have been interested in being a part of an artistic community.

In 2014 I created my own photography community, and Photography World, Ltd. Co. was born. The humble beginnings leaned much on a certain social media, but I quickly grew disinterested in such platforms and abandoned them all nearly well before the world’s plague of 2019. Then the website content was lost! Coupled with this I sadly, at that time, lost a number of very close family members.

Photography World is now finding its baring’s again, and I have returned after quite a long absence. Even though it lay bare as to the white pages of website death, it was never truly far from my heart and mind’s eye. So, now I venture forth again with sometimes reckless abandon, into marshy sloughs and starry nights, sitting for long periods of time on sun-kissed boulders of the Rockies and upon distant shores of Caribbean blue seas. There are many stories told in our photographs, and many more whose images are yet to be. Two women standing in a window with a nation’s story unfolding at their feet, Photography World here we come!