About Kaddish
Kaddish (2005)
My portfolio of Italian cemetery portraits, “Memoria,” reflects many years of absorption in those images. When I began to work with similar subject matter found in Jewish cemeteries in America, I took a similarly straightforward approach. Eventually, however, I chose to pursue a different way of seeing and representing them, a way that was more tentative and evocative than direct and descriptive. The portraits that particularly struck me seemed somehow fragile and elusive, so I sought to photograph them in a way that would show them emerging only partially from nearly indecipherable surroundings. In this way I hoped to suggest the intimate yet unknowable mysteries that the portraits themselves seem still to embody.