Photographic Ruminations
What in the world? Provence ? Vietnam? Cambodia?
This website is a rumination – bits and pieces of my life -- displayed in nine galleries, for the pleasure of anyone who stumbles in and takes a look.
ABOUT ME
In seventh grade, in Geneva, I was given an Agfa camera by a friend’s father. Since, photography has stuck with me along with books – I co-founded, The Photographic Eye in Cambridge, MA, an early rare photo book store and gallery, soon followed by Ars Libri, Ltd in Boston, the well-known international rare art, architecture and design book company. Later, I was President of Schoenhof’s Foreign Books. Then I faced the music: fulltime photography. For over a dozen years I was a commercial photographer in Washington, D.C., Provence, and South East Asia. I photographed everything from political conventions, to schools, theatre, historic preservation and, of course, weddings, bar mitzvah’s and embassy parties. Ironically, bookselling was my true meal ticket.
ABOUT PROVENCE
My sister and I credit our parents prescience – in 1960 they bought a farmhouse in what I call ground-zero-Provence: the valley of the Luberon (Gordes, Rousillon, Bonnieux) – the region didn’t catch on for another twenty-five years. My sister is a PhD medievalist, and our domed Provencal living room was built around 1500 A.D. – she never escaped. Happily, she is acknowledged as one of the best cooks in the region (another American interloper).
We have a large and several smaller houses in the hamlet. The large house is rented every year, June through September. Interested? Get in touch directly with us. You can see the house on VRBO as “Classic Provencal Family House.”
ABOUT HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN CHU QUYEN, VIETNAM
The restoration of the community house in Chu Quyen was an architectural prize-winning best practices demonstration of how to restore a 15th century historic building by disassembling it, restoring the parts, then re-assembling the whole. The French Asian Research Institute, the École française d’Extrême-Orient, has archived twelve hundred of my photos of the project. Find them by clicking on Fonds Sheppard Ferguson at: https://collection.efeo.fr/ws/web/app/report/les-fonds.html