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Well the drop outs continue. Although I did get 2 nice notes explaining why they dropped. What amazes me is how many creative people have dropped. I thought this project may have sparked their imagination I wonder if it’s me. … Continue reading
What will you give to witness a transformation?
What would you give to see a people who are no longer villains or victims?
How much is it worth to see a rebirth?
This summer I will be in Germany photographing this new country and people born from the cinders of history.
Meet the new faces of Germany in our global economy.
Make a pledge today, time is running out to fund this poignant and enlightening photo book project!
As you know I am a military brat from a military family whose service can be traced back to the Civil War. Since then there has been at least one if not many more of my family involved in every conflict/war the US has been involved in. Many of my ancestors reached high ranks in the Navy, but we have also had family in every branch of the military. We are a family who truly understands that freedom is not free, but born on the backs of the men and women who live and die to protect it.
We have a special connection to WWII. Partly because the name Welling still holds records in the navy, but also those very same men were German themselves. Their grandfather came here to build a better life, fought in the civil war and saw the rest of his family return to Germany as they missed the farming lands of home. His only sister became a professor at Heidelberg University. She and the family remained there through the dark times of Germany. No one knows what happened to those family members during the war, although we are trying to trace them.
My family felt the stigma of our german heritage in those days and I grew up watching all or most of the villains in movies being German. I was born nearly 30 years after the war ended but I was born in Germany and endured being called a Nazi by many grade school children who thought it was funny. I was asked if my family (Americans) were nazis or holocaust survivors. I even had one teacher ask if my mother was a Germany war bride. I grew up in an Italian neighborhood that celebrated their heritage despite the fact that Italy aligned itself with Germany. My German heritage took a back seat to my Irish side for in Boston you could always find the Irish.
As I grew older and more interested in my German ancestry, I wonder where all the German Americans were. There are approximately 75,000 scattered throughout Massachusetts, yet it’s hub and capital, Boston has only on german restaurant.
When I returned to Germany in the ’90’s and several times over the last 5 years, I found nothing of the caricatures we see in the media. Just warm, funny people who have been humbled by history yet have rebuilt a country and a life out of the ashes.
When I looked around I didn’t see holocaust survivor or nazis that escaped punishment, but people. People who had the same worries and
Concerns that we do. I have seen their remarkable resilience of a people who rebuilt a shattered world. This gave me the idea for an art project to show the world the people I see.
I will be traveling to Germany this summer for work and study. While there I will photograph the remarkable people, events and emotions that fuel this new Germany.
I hope to produce a photo book of these pictures and could use your support in getting it produced I have just 2 days left to meet my goal, please make a pledge today!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1222109235/collective-thoughts-my-german-summer
This will be the subject of a future photography project, once Torso is complete, but I wanted to get my thoughts down.
I have always loved photography. It fascinated me even as a child looking through little snippets of life in family albums. I would invent dialogues in my head to accompany them, even when I knew the reality was quite different.
But something changed in me around junior high. I shut down and became afraid to want. I was convinced that it would do no good, as I would never get what it was that I wanted anyway, so why want at all. It was no mere coincidence that it was also around this time when I became very angry.
My anger was directed at my father and anything connected with him. I would become infuriated when my family said I looked like him or that I had this trait or that trait of his. To me this was an insult for to me, at that time, my father was a violent monster who was the last person I wanted to be like.
My father loved photography so I abandoned it; that way I wouldn’t be like him. I abandoned my writing (except for journaling) as well, because it was something that I wanted to be good at (although I didn’t know it then) and I didn’t want to be disappointed yet again when it was taken from me.
My grandmother would tell me that I was too smart to write and I should look into doing something practical for work. She never said a career; it was always “work” or a “job”.
I suppressed these potential passions until both my grandmother and my father died six months apart during my senior year of college. This began my journey of understanding and forgiveness. It also was one of discovering who I am. That lady I am still learning about and probably will be until my death.
It took me a long time to come to terms with my violent past, to understand that my father wasn’t just a monster but a victim as well. He was broken long before I came to be and my presence was not and could not be the cure for his post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Through this journey my mental and emotional awakening was followed by a physical one — cancer. For most people cancer leads to fear and worry. For me it was a release. It allowed me to give myself permission to “want” to not only find my passions, but to pursue them.
Cancer taught me how to let go –
Cancer taught me how to forgive –
Cancer taught me how to embrace life.
I want to explore the meaning of “embrace” in a project that takes the audience through a mother’s first embrace of her child to our final embrace of the inevitable.
I’m not sure how it will take shape yet but I anticipate finishing Torso
By the end of summer and begin fleshing out “Embrace” in the fall.
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