Solitary Confinement

Photographed through the bedroom window at my cottage in Platte Clove in West Saugerties after Veronikka's unexpected death in September 2017, Each morning I woke to the view from this window of the landscape behind the cottage - a place where we would walk, explore, and photograph together. With her suddenly absent in my life, viewing this familiar place from this window became as familiar as looking at the face of a clock marking my passing through the day. Yet it was also as foreign as an overseas country - a place without a map, a land untraveled. Watching this scene slowly course through its natural, seasonal progression through the deep turf of grief, a lament and longing for her to return to our mutually familiar place, an invitation. Over time it became a healing call to return to the landscape with the understanding that time moves forward, seasons change, life continues. Perhaps it was her spirit's way of calling me back, reminding me of this in a language familiar to me photographically (like a viewfinder and camera). I don't really know. What I do know is that grief and sadness were tremendously anchoring and became my sudden, constant companions - unromantic and dispassionate yet touching me as deeply as our love once had touched me. With the frame of the images as the constant, the seasons and the time of day in the photograph is the change and transportation through the emotion. The photographs are presented chronologically.