Elise Walking Away I

Early in our marriage when we would go hiking or walking, my wife, Sharon Elise Dunn, would often grow impatient with my fussiness with photographing and walk into the frame, both ruining and improving my compositions. I vowed that one day we would turn this habit of hers into a project.

In the spring of 2004, we were heading out to Eastern Washington for a short weekend road trip and she wore a black tank top and black sandals, along with this wonderful flowing black skirt that I had not seen before. I think she called it a concertina skirt. "That's it," I said, and that weekend we began working on the details of how we wanted to portray her character.

Cat Call, the first image below, was from that first weekend and provided us with one of the key elements of the project - to create a character with a full emotional range without ever showing her face. This serves two purposes: 1) to show the powerful connection between body language and environment, and 2) to allow viewers to place themselves in the position of the character. All images from 2004 to 2018 are on a variety of black and white films, mostly Ilford HP4 and HP5. In 2018 I finally went digital.