The Bell School Project allows me access to the world of Chicago Public Elementary School children rarely, if ever, seen by the public, parents and many of the teachers.

I’ve had the great privilege of making pictures at the Alexander Graham Bell School since last February, commissioned by CPSLives, an arts organization in partnership with Chicago Public Schools. Bell School is 100 years old, comprising three programs: Neighborhood, Deaf and Gifted. There are 1,000 students in total; all students learn sign language.

One sees tremendous physical affection among the children of all grades. Cell phones are not permitted, creating opportunities for deeper engagement among the kids. There’s a great awareness of social justice issues throughout the school. Students in the upper grades participated in the March for Our Lives last spring.

I’ve approached this project as street photography in timing and proximity– trying to describe without preconceptions or disruption of the activity around me. I’m interested in portraits of individual children as well as the collective energy and exuberance of the children at lunch and at recess. The architecture of the stately 1917 building provides a setting for the spontaneous theater the children enact each day. The drama, enthusiasm and spirit of the children is abundant, almost overwhelming at times! I’m drawn to portray individual children, their games and their relationships to one another.

The project has created a new sense of community at Bell as the pictures are seen and shared.

A Father’s Story is an intimate chronicle of my husband’s relationship to our only child over 22 years from Emma’s birth until now.  I am interested in the passage of time, in charged moments of deep feeling, fleeting and unrepeatable. Rather than providing answers, I intend these images to suggest questions about the mystery, joy, connection and loss we experience in our one precious lifetime.

My best projects form slowly, accumulating images until the weight of that accumulation forces me to recognize a subject that had been under my nose all along. In addition to the photographs, the project will include relevant text excerpts from my journal woven throughout the images. In gathering these photographs together I realized it's rare to see a long-term project in which a photographer focuses on a father’s relationship to their child.

Roger’s story is very different from the traditional one my often absent father of eight children lived, as Roger was fortunate to retire young from a demanding career when Emma was 7 years old. After retirement Roger was omnipresent in Emma’s life, taking her on his morning runs, driving her to school, helping to care for Emma when she was sick, and coaching many of her soccer, baseball, basketball and softball teams.

To me, A Father’s Story suggests that fathers can be a powerful and guiding presence, nurturing intimacy in a girl’s life– an antidote to the stories of exploitation and abuse by father-figures that we read about almost daily.

We got rid of the oldest things first in cleaning out my studio.  When my husband lifted a pile of beaten-up salon cases, I spied an interesting one on top, criss-crossed with packing tape, post marks, and a label from the Guggenheim Foundation. I took a photo with my phone and reluctantly let the case go. After all, I wouldn’t make much progress if I couldn’t let things go. 

Yet the decision nagged at me. I couldn’t get it out of my head– there was a palimpsest of character and history in those materials, now gone forever.

Standing amid my life’s work– dozens of darkroom paper boxes, hundreds of prints, thousands of negatives, crates of cameras and framed photographs– I knew I had to photograph these objects. The themes central to my art and life were hand-written on boxes and cases: Funeral & Family, Queen of Hearts, Apparition Lesson, Christ Bride, Cellar Door. Once used simply as internal titles to organize my images, in Notes to Myself  these titles read like a cryptic narrative from a private journal or an inadvertent archive inscribed in rhythmic fragments.

So began a project that’s quite a departure from my photographs of American women and girls.  Notes to Myself:  An Inadvertent History is both an intimate record of my life’s work and a slice of the history of photography dating back to the 1970s.

I made the first the Cellar Door picture in May, 2001, as a homage to the famous Alfred Steiglitz portrait of Georgia Engelhard.  We had just celebrated Emma’s sixth birthday with a party in the backyard.  Emma climbed up on the old cellar door;  I was reminded of Steiglitz's photograph... and so it began. 

It wasn’t until a year had gone by that I thought to continue the series, at first once a year and then once every season or so. Emma is now twenty-one years old and the photographs span more than a decade. We see Emma grow as the state of the house and garden change with her. My subjects here are emerging feminine identity, memory andthe passage of time. I asked Emma about her experience of the series and her response was a revelation to me.

Emma writes: "Over the years, my mom persuaded me with various incentives to climb up onto the cellar door to take photos; I remember resisting and arguing with her every time. I am grateful that she didn’t give up or give into my protests, especially during my angsty teenage years. Now when I look at the Cellar Door series I finally see what she always saw— a unique, meaningful compilation of my childhood and how I became the woman I am today. I remember who I was when she captured every image and why I chose each outfit for the series. When I look back on the Cellar Door Series I see the beginning of my love for sports that continues to this day; the comfort I felt as a “tomboy” skater girl at Montessori school; the intense pressure to act feminine and heterosexual at Catholic middle school; several stages in the battle against my eating disorder; and my slow acceptance of my lesbian identity. Individually, each Cellar Door image evokes touching memories, yet the beauty of my Mom’s vision lies within the series' collective power to reveal my personal growth and experience in a profound way."

TWO (Harper Design; On Sale April 14, 2015; $29.99) is an exquisite collection of captivating and thought-provoking photographs by award-winning photographer Melissa Ann Pinney that contemplate the essence of duality in our relationships and in the world that surrounds us. Pinney, whose work is in the permanent collections of dozens of American museums, including the Metropolitan, MoMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty, aims her lens at pairs—mostly, but not always human—that display or imply elusive connections of mind, of spirit, or of simply the act of being. 

Edited and introduced by Pinney’s friend, New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett, the volume is filled with memorable images that encase rich stories: two children at play, a pair of aging friends, parent and child, couples in love. But deeper meanings can lurk in the margins of the frame, in the expressions in the eyes, in the disconnect of the connection. Photographs without human subjects bear their own mysteries: two nesting tea cups, an indoor pool, two chairs in autumn.

 Patchett, whose enthusiasm for Pinney’s vision helped bring this project to fruition, has paired the photographs with remarkable essays about the nature of two, commissioned from some of the best writers at work today: Edwidge Danticat, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Russo, Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, Alan Gurganus, Maile Meloy, Elizabeth McCracken, Jane Hamilton, and Billy Collins (who provides a beautiful poem celebrating “two creatures bound by wonderment.”)

“I’ve always been interested in watching people together. I wonder what their story is, who they are to each other,” Pinney writes in the preface. “”No matter how uninspired I feel, how dull I think a place is, when I look at the world through a camera a new beginning takes place.”

Filled with startling, sensitive images and nuanced prose, TWO is an illuminating  keepsake of human experience, at once universal and unique.

The series, Girl Ascending, began with my photograph of a girl seemingly suspended in mid-air, holding onto a chain-link fence with one hand, her dress lifted by the breeze. The circumstances are commonplace: a baseball game, nondescript buildings and a dirt field seen through the fence. Nevertheless, the improbable levitation and serene demeanor of the girl suggested the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary to one, raised, as I was, on the symbolic imagery of Catholicism. I am interested in the passage of time, the cycle of the seasons, girls’ friendships and their ties to the elders who guide them. The images that most intrigue me are epiphanies, in which the ordinary reveals an underlying significance.

This project focuses on a touchstone moment in the lives of American women and girls: their emergence from protected youth to public maturity. From a core series of photographs of my daughter, Emma, the project has swirled out though friends and classmates, past their families, neighborhoods, social rituals, and community lives to develop a study of emerging female identity with all its promises and perils. 

My mother, at seventy years old, told me that every time she looked in the mirror she wondered who "that old bat" was looking back. In her mind’s eye she still had the face she had at eighteen. This, after eight children and forty years of marriage. The photographs in Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women & Girls explore both the persistence of the child-in-the-woman and the early cultivation of the woman- in-the-child. Girlhood may be understood as a part of a continuum that women revisit regardless of age. 

Before our child was born nineteen years ago, it was generally understood among friends and family that the baby would be a girl. After all, women had been the subject of my work for many years. This happy coincidence of biology and feminism presented me not only with Emma, a daughter I cherish, but with new opportunities for making pictures as well. When I began the series Feminine Identity in 1987, I focused mostly on adult women. Now the scope of my work has widened to more often include men as fathers, grandfathers, husbands and brothers. But in photographing my own daughter and our family life together - in regarding Emma day by day- it has become clear that the heart of the project lies in images of girlhood.

It was a tradition at the Academy of the Sacred Heart for Girls in Chicago to wear white dresses for graduation long before I attended high school there. When my daughter was getting ready for 8th grade graduation in 2009 I wanted to make a book of portraits for the class. I photographed each girl in the dress chosen for the ceremony in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton. In spite of many requirements having to do with color, skirt length, width of strap, height of neckline and over-all modesty, there was a wonderful diversity of style and expression among the girls.

Sunshine & Other States refers not only to Florida, the original sunshine state, where many of these photographs were made, but to other states both geographical and psychological, to states of mind and being, more often dark than sunny.

Chicago has a remarkable collection of swimming pools and historic field houses throughout the city. I discovered the Hamlin Park Pool when I moved into a north side neighborhood near the park, first as a dedicated swimmer and only later as a photographer. This was my first venture into documentary style, street photography. The Hamlin Park Pool taught me how to appreciate a situation where the light, the people and the environment itself was beyond my control. The studio is about building pictures through slow careful accumulation of detail but this kind of picture-making was about responding to the flow of energy among the children, anticipating where it might next become visible- and being ready when it did. The subject of water, girlhood and spontaneous play that I discovered in this project continues to preoccupy me; it can be seen throughout all my subsequent work.

I was drawn to photograph in Chicago's south-side, Hispanic neighborhood of Pilsen because of the vibrant street-life. I met and photographed a teen-age ex-gang member who introduced me to his mother and sisters and then to his aunts, uncles and cousins. I photographed in bars, homes and at weddings. The project took me, alone and often at night, to what were then regarded as dangerous neighborhoods. The loneliness and risk that infused the pictures held a gritty allure for me.