Artist's Statement on "Letters from Paris"

"Letters from Paris" began with my interest in family letters that date back to the turn of the century. These letters were among items given to us when my husbands' parents moved from their family home in Cleveland Park to a Massachusetts Avenue apartment about twenty years ago. The handwritten letters were stowed in shoe boxes, the paper yellowed, crumbling at the edges. I sorted through them and filed them in archival boxes. From time to time I would glance at the shelved boxes and think about their contents. Finally, about five years ago, I retrieved the letters one day and began to pore over them, becoming more and more familiar with the handwriting, the family story coming together like a puzzle.

I began to think of ways to incorporate the letters into photographs. Four trips to Paris in as many years yielded the images I wanted to work with. I visited many of the places mentioned in the letters. The apartment building on Malakoff Avenue is gone but the street sign remains. The Exposition of 1900 is referred to in one letter, the Champs Elyseés, the Bois de Boulogne-much of Paris remains timeless. It took several trips to find places that I could photograph without the intrusion of today's automobile traffic, power lines, satellite dishes and antennae. Along with the straight photographs I used some of the images in collages, some produced as silk screen prints. I photographed the letters and rephotographed some of the old photos. Many of the letters are printed archivally on artist's paper.