Portfolio Category - Portrait Awards 2014

Talk Tompkins is a series in progress of portrait photographs and audio interviews about the varied people and communities that make up my home county in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. In the middle of mostly depressed rural and post-industrial Upstate, the county contains a "bubble" of prosperity flowing from Cornell University and Ithaca College. However, I'm paying attention to town, village, and rural people more than to academics or students. Many communities - of ethnicity, national origin, geography, history, interest, and economic status - are layered into the area. I discover more and more as I work. The project is part of 150 Years and Counting, the sesquicentennial celebration of Tompkins County Public Library on Green Street in Ithaca, NY. Exhibited in this center of community activities, the work shows the people of the county to each other. Talk Tompkins is supported in part by an Artist in Community Decentralization grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.