India 2011-2017

In 2013 I received a Fulbright award based on my wife and I discovering a shoebox of 4x5" negatives and vintage prints made in India by an anonymous US soldier in India towards the end of WWII. "Following the Box" allowed my wife (and partner in the project) and I to spend 5 months in West Bengal, researching the photos and working with contemporary Indian artists to use the old photos to inspire the creation of new artworks in various disciplines (photography, film, painting, illustration, graphic novel, folk art, mixed-media, installation art.) I received several other grants that afforded me the opportunity to make subsequent trips to India. The images shown here come from those experiences and from a short preliminary research trip in 2011. As a resident, rather than a tourist, I got to know various communities intimately, sharing meals, ceremonies, stories. It reinforced my sense of wonder that we exist at all and made it abundantly clear that that it is the sum of every culture, every person, every belief, every story that makes us human. My photography asks viewers to go into the frame and look around. In most images there are two things on which to focus: the boy and the idol; the woman and the sculpture; the bicycle rider and 'Che'; the boy and the tiger paintings; the sweet shop patron and the portrait of Tagore, etc. This mirrors my general way of looking at the world around me--there is just so much to see. Photography provides a way to process and interpret the world, which I try and share with others.