Writer – Photographer – Educator
...the story behind my obsession with (photographing) the VFT carnivore plant Here's an excerpt from my book, JOURNEYS THROUGH DARKNESS: A BIOGRAPHY of award-winning, legally blind photographer Kurt Weston: In 1993, Kurt Weston founded SWAN--Surviving With AIDS Network--a grassroots group that offered those living with HIV a safe place to be, socialize, and share their [...]
What I've learned about photography and life from award-winning photographer Kurt Weston In 2005, I came across an award-winning photograph posted online. It was called "The Last Light" and featured a man with a drawn face and ghostly eyes. He was sitting in a chair with his back at a tall window. He appeared as [...]
Photographing and interviewing ACT-UP activists March is not only Women's History Month, but it also marks the anniversary (the 34th this year) of ACT UP--the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. Over the past twenty years, I've had the opportunity to meet, interview and photograph many LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS activists, many of them ACT UP activists. [...]
Interviewing photographers
The story of a black-and-white Lensbaby photograph on World AIDS Day 2020 Angels in America has been a source of inspiration for many artists, in particular those capturing the AIDS pandemic of the eighties. The Bethesda angel is a symbolic figure at the center of Tony Kushner’s play, and, itself, a source of inspiration. Known [...]
How I made that shot and the story behind my "No Surrender" image Those of you reading this blog might recall some of my previous posts mentioning a new series of hand portraits and self-portraits, which is still very much a work in progress. Here's the story behind one of the images in this series--No [...]
Drawing parallels between AIDS and Covid-19 pandemics (or how HIV and AIDS has inspired creative work capturing Coronavirus and Covid-19) Several people, on different occasions, have asked me to talk about similarities and differences between the pandemic of the eighties (or the eighties' "plague," how Larry Kramer called it) and the current, Coronavirus pandemic. While [...]
Capturing the Coronavirus pandemic in words and images To borrow from Jonathan Larson's "Seasons of Love" [RENT, the musical], I wonder how do we measure a month in a life defined by the Coronavirus? I've never lived through a pandemic. I've been covering HIV and AIDS for almost twenty years, oftentimes through the stories of [...]
World AIDS Day 2019 World AIDS Day falls on December 1, an important day for me, personally, for a couple of other reasons. And for those reasons, this year's WAD was in particular a tough day for me. But, as they say, "the show must go on." Therefore, I spent WAD 2019 lighting candles, remembering [...]
Identity. WAD 2007. And Also how I met celebrity host, actor and advocate, Ron B.
