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Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower – but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

--Tennyson

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     It is difficult for me to take hold of and talk about the many layers of meaning that reflect my particular style of photography. But I can say this: when I photograph a landscape – whether a window of an old boarding house or stained wall of a prison camp – I imagine those who have stood before me in these same places and feel their presence, their rootedness. And when I photograph a person – whether a young child or an old man – I feel grateful. When I am allowed these privileges of “plucking” an individual, a tree, or a rice terrace “out of the crannies,” and holding them “root and all” with my camera and in the darkroom, I feel like I have come home.

 

     My grandparents, Roland and Katie Ewart, immigrated to America in the late 19th century. Working as cooks in the local mining camps near Lake City, Colorado, they raised their children and lived their lives in a log cabin on the bank of Lake San Cristobal and in the century-old homes on Silver Street. Roland died in 1920 during the Spanish Flu pandemic, and Katie was left alone to care for herself and her young children. Oldest of the seven children, my dad, William, left Lake City upon graduating high school to find work to support his mother and siblings.  Eventually he found his way to Aruba in the late 1920’s where he met and married my mother, a young school teacher from Pennsylvania. The two of them stayed on in Aruba for over thirty years; this is where my brother and I were born and raised.

 

     Spending my childhood on this small desert island, I became intimately connected to the land and to the waves that endlessly crashed up onto the coral reefs, to the wild cunucu inhabited by iguanas, billy goats and people living in tin huts, with skin colors different than my own, speaking languages I couldn’t understand. When my family would return to Lake City during the summer months, I listened to and absorbed the many stories about the early days in Lake City told to me by my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and dad. My photography is fundamentally rooted and driven by the courage, perseverance, and love woven throughout these stories as well as my own culturally rich childhood experiences growing up on Aruba.

 

Living in Houston

 

     Now living in Houston, Texas, I am an attorney and a former pediatric nurse practitioner. After retiring from the practice of law, I have taken up my love of photography, and with it, my love of traveling and exploring other cultures and ways of life. Using a vintage Hasselblad film camera, I am continuing my nineteen year mentorship with Amy Blakemore and Will Michels at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where I use the darkroom and photography lab for making silver gelatin prints of my images.  I am married and have three daughters and a grandson.