I remember my first camera, it was a bubblegum pink 35mm.

I don’t recall the brand name, but I recall how much I enjoyed taking pictures of just about everything with it. In college, I moved on up to my grandfather’s old school SLR(single lens reflex)Canon, I think I had it more than he did. The Canon used something almost unheard of in this day and age, film. My Nikon N60 also uses film. I’ve yet to upgrade to digital, though I hear they are quite the treat.

Despite my love of taking pictures I seldom exhibit them unless one counts my Myspace and Facebook accounts. Oh sure, my day job is in photography, at a retail photo studio. People see those photographs all the time. My clients are usually in the under 5 years of age category. It pays the bills but doesn’t satisfy the need to create, many times it doesn’t feel creative at all.

The photos I do for myself are entirely different from the ones I take at work. One of my favorite things to photograph are churches and cathedrals. I’m not religious. I suppose I was at one point in my life, like when I was first put into catechism classes at age 6. Jesus seemed like a cool enough guy when I was 6. Of course the catechism books were also filled with pictures and stories. I loved (and still do) picture books and stories. I grew up. I realized people believed in and had faith in said stories, where I found myself questioning them. The people running the Catholic Church don’t always believe in or accept me as a woman with a right to chose. As a woman who doesn’t believe in teaching the youth of America that the best mode of birth control is abstinence. As a woman who may or may not marry a man. Though, despite it all, I’m still drawn to religious iconography, art and architecture.

The Maria S.S. Incoronata Difoggia was this sweet little chapel in the middle of a neighborhood in Coventry, Rhode Island. I took these when I was a senior at UMASS, Dartmouth using my grandfather’s Canon. Unfortunately, the chapel was demolished shortly after these were taken.

The steeple of the Holy Ghost Church on Atwells Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island can be seen on Route 10, if one cares to look up while zooming by it – being an artist, I do every time:

The Boys Training Center at Sockanosset, located in Cranston, Rhode Island, was one of my absolutely favorite places to trespass and take pictures of. I was intrigued by these buildings as a child even when my parents threatened to send me there if I wasn’t ‘good.’ At the time I had no idea that they had been abandoned decades prior.

One cold New England winter in 1999 I trespassed onto the site, armed with my Grandfather’s Canon to take my first series of images of this location – bulldozers and all. In later years, I used my Nikon N60. Over the course of four years, I documented the transformation of this location. I watched as buildings I loved were demolished and my only memory being the photographs I stored in a box in my closet. The location is now a strip mall called “Chapel View.” They are still in the process of renovating the chapel, which was one of my favorites.

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