Boathouses

Having spent over 35 years visiting Lake Vermilion in Northern Minnesota I found few subjects as intriguing as the old traditional boathouses. Many of them are gone, but especially in Stuntz Bay near the Soudan Iron Mine they still stand shoulder to shoulder around that large bay.

It felt appropriate to document these interesting historical buildings with similarly old technology using wooden pinhole cameras and plastic cameras from the 1950’s, printing in a wet darkroom, and toning and hand coloring most of the prints.

Cabin Life

While I photographed old boathouses my husband and I stayed in a similarly antique cabin from the 1930’s? 40’s? built by two brothers who worked in the Sudan Mine. It suited us perfectly and had everything we needed, shelter, stove, privacy. Later there was a sauna. This charming cabin passed out of the family, but there are so many memories.

SW Portraits

These are portraits of friends and neighbors in the American Southwest, my other point of reference, and where I was born. Here the spectrum of conservative to liberal, urban to rural, Indigenous, Hispanic, European, and so many other cultures have combined to create a complex mosaic.