Both my parents grew up in the Northeast, the children of Jewish immigrants from Europe. My dad became a physician and was accepted into and an elite orthopedic surgery residency at the University of Iowa, far away from his roots. At the conclusion of training, he moved my mother, sister, and me to Waterloo, Iowa, less than one hundred miles from the university town of Iowa City, but it might as well have been a different world. Few people had ever seen a Jew before. Our entire family felt uncomfortable and isolated from our neighbors, classmates, and colleagues. Dad faced obstacles as he tried to begin his practice. Many in the medical community initially shunned him because he was an outsider. Over the years he gradually earned the respect of other physicians and built a good practice. But none of us ever felt comfortable. Home was our refuge.

My sister Sydney and I have gone back to Waterloo several times since we left decades ago. On one visit in 2014, the owners of our old house kindly allowed us to look inside the house, which had changed little since we lived there. When I made this picture, the bright green on the outside contrasted with the dark living room. The image depicts a long-ago feeling that has never left me.

The scattered pieces of trash on the floor re-appear again in the smudged mirror. The silhouetted figure could be anyone. When we look in our mirrors, we often focus on what we do not like to see – our “holes.” Too fat, bad skin, yellow teeth, etc. We tell our children and ourselves to love and accept ourselves as we are, a tough task despite all the self-help books out there. Most of us strive to fix our flaws but some of them may just be unfixable.

Many years ago, I went into therapy to work out some of my issues, especially with my father. My dreams often featured holes of various kinds. My therapist, of course, pointed out that the holes represented the deficiencies I saw in myself. The theme of holes recurs in many of my pictures. For several years I have photographed a drainage chute in a pond near my house. I focus on the square pitch-black hole that catches the constant stream of water emptying into it.

The jagged holes in the windows of this otherwise symmetrical bright yellow facade drew me immediately. One window on the right side is completely gone. The artistically pleasing red pieces of tape surround the holes, probably to warn people from inadvertently cutting themselves. Faintly visible reflections of blue sky and fluffy clouds in the intact portions of the windows provide some slight contrast.

I have sleepless episodes from time to time. The bright light in this hotel hallway shone through all four edges of the door and woke me in the middle of the night. I noticed the light coming through large gaps, not small cracks. Could the door be undersized relative to the space it inhabits? I could not get back to sleep but saw an opportunity to make an image. The light around the door was not enough, however. The five H “SHHHHH” sign and the bill under the door completed the picture for me.

Stalled traffic and storm clouds – in front and behind. In one sense the claustrophobic feeling of being unable to move in traffic or anywhere else makes me very anxious. The real approaching storm clouds, however, are the stalled cars spewing hydrocarbon emissions. Maybe an alien messenger (you will meet him soon) could warn the unbelievers about what will happen if we do not change our habits.

After I retired from my long career as an interventional radiologist, I dove into the world of fine art photography. I began my first long-term project photographing estate sales. The children of elderly or deceased parents often have the burden of getting rid of unwanted possessions left to them. They can hire third party agents to sort through their parents’ items and then conduct a sale open to the public. Basically one generation leaves (OK sells) its possessions to the next. I began photographing items at many sales each week. I found poignancy, sadness, irony, and humor at just about every sale.

One sale I visited was advertised in the paper as a “digger’s delight.” The ad recommended wearing long pants and no open-toed shoes. The house had been unoccupied for ten years and had an awful odor. All the items for sale were packed in boxes that one had to sift through to find anything. I skipped the boxes, but on one wall I saw an empty wooden picture frame hanging on a wooden wall. The stark emptiness became a familiar theme for me. A viewer could not necessarily assume that this image came from an estate sale, which made it more universal.

I love old boats. This one rested on a trailer in the yard of an abandoned house in Maine. I came every morning to photograph the moisture that had accumulated on the windows overnight. I had to climb onto the boat to get the best images. The wet, fogged windows obscure the world directly in front, but the elements on the sides come into clear focus with our peripheral vision. There are one or more metaphors here, but I leave them to the viewer.

We moved to Dallas forty-two years ago. This city has many virtues. It is more cosmopolitan than when we moved here. Long ago I saw a bumper sticker that said, “We don’t care how you done it up north.” Now many different cultures coexist here harmoniously. The city’s extremist reputation after the Kennedy assassination has abated, but extreme right wing political views are not hard to find. Racism still exists, often openly. Progress comes slower than we would like.

I look for stark scenes, which I knew I could find in a rural Texas drive-in movie theater. The dark sky, the creepy alien, the parked pickup trucks – a perfect setting for me.

The conundrum about the reality of aliens fascinates me. That an alien would visit us to give an earth-shaking message comes from science fiction. The real messengers are earthlings. We do not listen to them closely enough.

Now for the shocking news. We used to think that aliens did not exist, but that has been challenged recently. The government now acknowledges their presence, documented in sworn testimony to Congress and confirmed with video documentation from many video sightings by military pilots.

According to many sources, we have recovered crashed alien vehicles and also some non-human bodies. Maybe it’s not science fiction after all.

An enormous auto pound filled with hundreds of cars in various states of disrepair and destruction exists in a desolate area of Dallas. Once a month bidders come to inspect the vehicles which they can buy at auction later in the day, usually for parts. The police fortunately allowed me to enter on this cold December day despite having no authorization.

This place had some bad sights that day: cars that had been crushed in unsurvivable accidents, multiple windshields with bullet holes, car seats with the residual coins, family pictures and other knickknacks that had fallen out of the pockets of accident victims. It brought back memories of treating patients who desperately needed emergency care after life-threatening accidents. Physicians see people in various extreme states of distress that non-physicians rarely see. It shocks the system, especially starting out as a student. I got used to it, but I believe those experiences have influenced my worldview.

Dad overcame the early obstacles in his medical practice and became quite successful. Other physicians respected his expertise, and patients trusted him. Early on he moved from a rented office to a small office building that he had built. Dad retired in the late 1970’s, sold his building and moved with mom back to the east coast. The neighborhood deteriorated over the years to the point that the building could not be sold. On my last visit I saw the disrepair up close in the office where he saw patients. I rarely use compositing in my photography – superimposing other photographs into a picture. I had an old picture of him in this very office sitting back in his chair behind his desk. He looked confident and in his element. I did add this image to the picture to show that, despite the passage of time and all that had happened, he once worked here practicing his specialty and helping people.