Photography has always been an important part of my life. I was born in Rochester, New York, where George Eastman formed the Eastman Kodak Company and created easy-to-use cameras that made photography widely accessible to all. My father’s first job was at Kodak. I learned how to develop film in the darkroom in college and, more recently, worked at a nonprofit housed in the historic Polaroid building in Cambridge, Massachusetts — my desk was feet away from the legendary Edwin Land’s office.
Today, I work with photographs all the time in my role in communications at WGBH as Director of Editorial Resources, helping curate our Digital Mural and overseeing the production of Explore!, our member magazine, and our annual report. In my free time, I am an editor of ZEKE Magazine, devoted to documentary photography on global themes, and help run the Social Documentary Network, a community of photographers around the world. I am also a member of the Boston Women’s Photo League.
In these challenging days when we are staying inside, I found comfort looking at these documentaries about how photographers fared during tough times. Dorothea Lange’s moving images of migrants during the Great Depression in Whose Migrant Mother Was This; American Masters' portrayal of Garry Winogrand’s street photographs of life in New York City in the mid-20th century; to an inspiring Greater Boston interview with local photographer Matthew Collins who covered the protests in Hong Kong before the coronavirus outbreak. I also learned about super-fast cameras from NOVA.
And these ongoing PBS photography projects celebrate the power and importance of images in documenting our families, lives and humanity: Family Pictures USA and American Portrait. Photography is a record of our life and times. I can’t wait to get out there again to the galleries and museums.
