 I've always been interested in photography. From the time I was a little girl, my grandmother had portraits, photographic portraits of family all over her house. And she had one room, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, dedicated to pictures of people. And that's what I was drawn to in photography. And I used to spend hours and hours looking through photo albums, loved it. But I never really thought about doing it. And then as I got older, life got in the way, I did all these things. I was interested in art, took some art classes, did art history. And I discovered photography for myself when my husband left me after 25 years of marriage. And it was the one place that I could go where the rest of the world disappeared, the dark room. I applied to school again on a Pell Grant because I was supporting myself and my children. And I got the Pell Grant, I went to school at Appalachian State University in Technical Photography. And then I ended up moving back to Maine to be near my parents as they were getting older. And I applied to the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies because I did not want to give up what I had just found. And I was accepted and went through the program there. And I went from doing fine art photography to doing documentary photography. The show that I'm doing is called Stiletto Life. And I'm fascinated by stilettos because I cannot wear them. I mean, the idea of it hurts my body just looking at people in stilettos. But I love them. I love the sculptural aspect of them and the artistic side to the way they're created. And so I started taking pictures in stilettos. Everywhere I go, it's one of my little projects. You put on a pair of shoes and it does change your attitude. You know, you just become what those shoes are. I have one call, Let the Meat Cake, which I took in Versailles outside the gates of Versailles. I had just seen the whole place and Marie Antoinette was alive in my head. And I walked out the door and there was this woman with these shoes and these pants. And I thought, Let the Meat Cake. And the John is a picture of a woman on the toilet. And I just the idea of, you know, on these balancing on shoes is quite fun. The Kentucky Derby is more about shoes and hats than it is about horses, I think. I really do. And I'd always heard about the hats. So of course I went with a big hat and everyone had big hats. But I started looking at the shoes. The shoes were much more dramatic than the hats. And I'd always been looking up and I started looking down. And I have a whole, you know, slew of pictures of Derby shoes. There's a sign and it's called shoegasm, which, you know, it says it all I think about people and their shoes. And I stole that sign in New York City. I was just walking about actually taking, looking for shoes and there it was. I thought, okay, I was meant to be on the street with that sign there. I didn't know about the store, but I took the sign and it fits. There's one called wannabe. And little girls love, they want to be their mom. And dressing up is part of that. The little girl is my granddaughter, Laila, and the shoes were her mother's wedding shoes and she loves to wear her mother's shoes. So she put them on and not only did she wear them and walk in them, but she had this little attitude that sort of came with the shoes, with the hand on the hip. And I mean, I was like, she's five years old, just turned five. And she's got a damn pat going to the chapel. And it's a bride hiking up her dress and marching through Luxembourg Gardens with her intended or just married significant other. And a slew of people following them and the photographer. And you can just see her, you can see her stilettos, but you can see her pants rolled up under the dress, a pair of jeans. And I just thought it was so fun seeing her parading about in the garden with this beautiful dress and her jeans underneath and her stilettos. As we were walking through the museum, I saw this couple and they were quite involved in the art. But I looked down and she had on these stilettos. And I think walking all over a museum, you know you get museum exhaustion. And I thought my feet are always hurting at the end of a museum trip. And I thought, how can she do that? How can she spend all that time on those shoes, animated and moving? And I just, I just call it the met. When I frame a piece, when I do the composition, always, it depends on what I'm shooting. And a lot of these pictures that I have here are one, I just like that. I kind of have been doing it a while. So I kind of know the way I want it to speak to me. I was always a little afraid of digital. People of race, they delete digital. In the dark room, when I used to work in the dark room, you don't delete anything. You've got it all there in a contact sheet. So even though you choose one and the rest of it, you go back to it a year from now. And there's that picture that you never even thought about. And it's sitting right there looking at you going, what about me? And that's, you say, yeah, I've been waiting for you, where have you been? And so I don't delete any of my digital images because I've gone back and there are probably four or five in this show that I would have deleted. Background's always important to me. I mean, when I, I consider myself basically a portrait photographer. So these are portraits in my mind. And, and I like, I like textural backgrounds a lot. And, and when you look at these images, you see a lot of texture in the background. And also the toenails. I mean, when you've got open-toed stilettos, you don't just put your foot in there. You go to have your nails done. And there's one called Herringbone that is absolutely one of my favorites. Because, I mean, it just, how did they do that? I don't know, I don't get my nails done. And, and it's just a fabulous little shot of these great nails. But underneath you can see this little edge of red. Because I think she had red nail polish under that. This is a fun project and it's something I can do anywhere. But I also tend to like to do a little more depth in the work that I do. The last picture is called Ouch. As a woman, her foot's out of the shoe and it looks red and sore and it makes you go, ouch. I want to transition beyond that into what happens to your body when you wear shoes like this. It's not a natural position to be in. It causes sway back and all that. So I'm hoping to speak with some podiatrists and some orthopedic doctors, some chiropractors and take this to another level.