Dining Alone: In the Company of Solitude highlights the experience of being alone in public. I chose to photograph lone diners, in peopled restaurant interiors as a metaphor to explore the complexities of the subject of solitude. The subtle nuances of my lone diners visually define their experience. Though this work is staged, my subjects were asked to act out how they felt when they dine alone. Dining Alone is a long-term project spanning three (plus) decades, culminating in 2020 with photographs taken during the COVID-19 pandemic when restaurants moved their diners to makeshift structures outdoors to avoid contagion. The humanistic photographs shine a light on the existential and complex aspects of dining alone which have been thrown into sharp relief by COVID-19. In her foreword Laura Pressley writes: "The images unfold in a cinema verité style, so the camera is used to unveil truths in a documentary approach." Despite the isolation we had all experienced, we were all connected by the realization that the deadly virus did not discriminate, nor do the fragilities of life. We are all bound by our humaness, our mortality, our vulnerabilities. My hope is that our experiences of dining alone during the pandemic, will serve as an encouraging reminder that we found a way to come to terms with our aloneness again. This is my first monograph, published by Daylight Books, released in June 2022. (Continued below image)

The book was fully designed by Bonnie Briant and the initial edit was done by Elizabeth Avedon and then later sequenced by Bonnie when she designed the book. I chose to do this because I wasn’t sure whether I would self publish or go to a third party publisher and I wanted to envision what my book might look like. The series is a deeply person body of work and I’m very proud to have dedicated this book (and first monograph) to my late mother, Lila, who passed away at 93, in July 2021 in her lifetime. Lila had seen a book dummy and knew that I was working on publishing this project. When I was a senior in high school, my father, LIla’s husband, died prematurely. Shortly afterwards I went off to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I recall being very concerned about my mother and what life would become for her. Right next to that concern, I was concerned about my older sister and my younger brother, and of course, myself. What I came to witness was that my mother was a very strong and independent person. She was a creative thinker and her path was always forward. She took childhood education classes at Bank Street and eventually completed her MA so that she could teach. She started to make marionettes, became immersed in many other projects, forged new relationships, traveled, continued to host her family holiday traditions, and the list goes on. My mother was very social and had many friends but if she wasn’t able to get someone to join her for an event or an outing, she had no problem taking herself out, alone.

Once I graduated from college, I moved back to New York and lived alone in Greenwich Village, NYC. I pursued my freelance photography while also pursuing my fine art photography projects. Surrounded by some of the most wonderful coffeeshops, cafes and other restaurants, I would often grab a coffee, breakfast or a salad at some of my favorite places. I noticed that there were many people who were dining alone and I’d write alot about my observations and feelings. One day I decided to start a photography series about this topic. My desired genre was ‘Cinema Verite’ and so began this project. I invite viewers to enter my imagery just as they would when they enter a restaurant, knowing that as observers, we often project our own feelings, experiences and circumstances on to others which colors the way we see them and how we interpret their solitude. I believe that it takes courage to confront oneself and in our solitude that’s part of what we do. My point of view peeks through my imagery –my lone diner subjects are strong, independent and comfortable in their own skin. They are looking upward and outward, if they’re not thoroughly immersed by their respective activities– such as focusing on a book, their iPad, cell phone, or people watching.