What Is It to See?

For some time, I’ve been quiet here. Part of that silence has been practical and part of it has been deeply personal. Most of my life has revolved around seeing — through a camera lens, in the darkroom, while editing prints, teaching students, watching light move across a face or a landscape.

Vision has never simply been a tool for me; it has been the way I understand and move through the world. Over the past year, my eyesight has begun to change in ways that have deeply affected both my daily life and my work as an artist. I hesitated to write about this publicly. I did not want this space to become defined by loss, or to sound like a farewell to the work that has shaped my life. But silence began to feel stranger than speaking honestly. So, this is not an ending post: It is a marker.

I am still working, printing, thinking about sequencing images, paper surfaces, book structures, and light. In fact, I may be more aware of those things now than ever before. What has changed is the way I arrive there. Tasks that once felt instinctive now require patience, adaptation, magnification, audio tools, and often the help of others. There are moments of frustration and grief, certainly. But there is also curiosity in discovering how deeply visual memory lives inside the body after decades of making photographs.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about what it means to “see.” Not simply with eyesight, but with memory, intuition, touch, sound, and accumulated experience. Photography trained me to pay attention. That impulse has not disappeared just because my vision is changing. If anything, it has intensified.

I suspect this space may gradually become a place where I share some of that experience — not as a story solely about vision loss, but about continuing to make work, navigate uncertainty, and remain engaged with the creative life while learning new ways to move through it.

For now, I simply wanted to reappear here and say: I’m still here. Still looking. Still making.