melissa shook
Photos
Beautiful Lassie Racing
After months of watching races at Suffolk Downs, studying the past performances of all the Thoroughbreds up for claiming in her price range, Jenifer Vickery had her eye on two horses. Since the trainer she was planning to work wit…
Krissy
BEGINNING TO TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS
Just weeks after my daughter, Krissy, was born, I began to photograph her toothless smile and waving hands. My father had given me a Pentax camera for my eighteenth birthday and…
Aging
Bob and Mari Shook
My father, Bob, didn’t really age until he was eighty-four and developed an aneurysm in his stomach. Surviving that nicely, he went along, ignoring whatever medication had been prescrib…
Fr. John
On Krissy’s last day of high school, when she stood on the front stoop of our apartment building and said, “No more pictures,” I honestly didn’t know what I would do. Her graduation represented a marathon that I had been r…
Streets Are For Nobody
For many years I worked the occasional 3-11 shift as a counselor at a woman’s shelter in Boston. When I took a year leave-of-absence before my tenure decision, I was a coordinator in the women’s clinic, a job I left with great…
Port Washington Self-Portraits, 1973-74
I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of photographs – my own, those of other photographers, of hundreds of students, in magazines, newspapers, books. I’ve never been in love with the medium, though I think that words strengthen m…
Pinhole Images
These photographs were made in late spring when the sun coming into a side window is just perfect. I used my favorite shoebox pinhole camera and exposed fiber paper for from eight to fourteen minutes for the negatives. The text fo…
Flagging Spirits
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a friend from the dog park called, “Turn on your TV.” I did and saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. For days, I watched the same images over and over, talked to friends and re…