...it must be the full moon

This Full Moon, September 15, 2008, is in Pisces and is about emotion more than ever before.... from The Spiritual Eclectic.

I am a Pisces and today is the 15th..... and yes, today is ALL about emotion.

I collected the final canvas today. The journey is over, well almost over (the canvasses still need to be stretched and framed) and it has been an emotional roller coaster. But I am buoyed by the fact that I think that I/we have some of the most amazing images that will be going on display at Boston Children's Museum, starting on October 8 when 2008 Project: Tomorrow opens.

Shooting my images (I took pictures of the Child who was the Young Photographer in the Project:Tomorrow program with his/her Parent who was being/had been treated for cancer in the Marjorie E. Korff PACT (Parenting at a Challenging Time) Program at Massachusetts General Hospital ) was just an amazing experience. I basically let the Parents pick the venues in which they wanted to have the shot taken. The choices were as diverse as you could imagine. One was done at the top of a set of stairs that were dedicated to the Parent's mother, another by the ocean at a favorite picnic area, another in an arboretum and then a couple were simply shot in the backyard. In every case it was an experience... a unique experience. "Now you can't have a name on the T-shirt because everyone will focus on that and not you face"; "Do you think this necklace is too much"; "Mom, really... just try to act normal... pleeease!". I was able to do most families in a single sitting but in one case I needed four... patience I have seldom seen. What a group of troopers.

Then, there were the images taken by the kids with their Holgas. After a few false starts where I got some rolls of film back with double-exposure-itis, others with four images instead of 12, all nine kids hit their stride. How does the expression go: "Out of the mouths of babes..". Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the spectrum of images that they produced. Every thing form intense head on portraits to compositions that were completely off the wall.

A special Preview will be held just for the families and their invited guests on October 7. Each of the images will be accompanied by responses written by the parents and kids to questions about what the project has meant to them. None of the children or parents has seen the images taken by the kids or me or these writing assignments. The drill at the Preview will be that the nine children and their parents are going to be admitted into the Gallery for a brief period of time before any of the assembled guests so that they may share the experience of seeing this exhibit for the first time, privately. It is something they all are looking forward to and I am confident that it will be an emotional moment in time that all of the participants will cherish.