In July, I found myself heading back towards europe for some family time. My mother now lives in the Geneva area, and I hadn’t been out there to visit her since she left Washington DC. I’m hoping to branch out into finding work in both Geneva and DC, because I don’t visit either of my parents often enough.†

After Geneva, my mother and I rendezvoused with the rest of the family in normandy at La Porte Rouge. At the earlier family reunion, I’d taken a ton of photos, and my mother had made a great little book of them as a gift for my grandparents. This time, after many years of completely integrating my work and personal lives, I was determined to try to pry them apart a bit, so no pictures… It’s hard, because good candid portraits are always there to be taken… but it’s an exhausting zone to always be in, so I used the excuse that I couldn’t take any pictures while I was busy holding my new baby cousins. (This was of course a blatant lie, because I’ve taken plenty of good pictures while holding my friend’s twins, or with a dancer climbing on my shoulders for that matter) -†

But on the Philly photographic front, one of the highlights of July was working with Sebastienne Mundheim on photos for her upcoming Sea of Birds piece. The things that she makes out of very simple materials are really wonderful… She was a bit frazzled at the time, but the piece apparently came together to wide acclaim at the Live Arts Festival, and people told me many great things about it, but sadly I missed it myself, as I was scrambling to redo this website and hers wasn’t among the list of shows that I was assigned to by the festival this year…

I was getting ready to engage with the festival in two different ways- both more as a professional in photographing it, limiting myself to only actually photographing the shows that I was getting paid to shoot (even though in the past, some of the best gems were the ones that I’d thrown myself into unpaid) and also as a “performer”, as we’d decided to hold some more dance/photo sessions for How Philly Moves as a performance event in the festival.