Welcome to my Image Story Collection

In a religious sense, reliquaries are small gated chapels or ornate containers enshrining the bones, teeth, or hair of martyred saints. I feel as though any container or any shape or size can be a reliquary; it can hold physical objects or more ephemeral items, such as memories or ideas. In my images, I deconstruct what the reliquary might hold, and at the same time telling its story.

I am a War Orphan; my father was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967. In the Fall of 2014, on my first trip to Vietnam, I took what I thought my “truth” was that country that we warred with. I forced myself to look through the layers of the years and my so-called knowledge to meet a country that we had invaded. I tried to meet them as they were; a country that won the American War. Yes, all over Vietnam are war relics displaying pride in their country and their heroes. The same kind of pride we have in our country for our war heroes. I was privileged to be introduced to a totally different, yet equally valid experience of a period in history. 

Destruction of Earth, our only home, seems never ending. Every day, events, intended and unintended, chip away at our habitat. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010, provided me a concrete example to represents every other blight, that affects not only our world, but also our children.

I can travel to foreign countries, I can travel across the street, I can imagine travel in the images of nature that I capture. These images hold the hope that you can smell, taste, and see what I call travel and nature.