These are images taken in the UK, with my travel camera. In the PROSE PIECES section you can read the title essay of my photo-memoir Gulls and Crows, about my final visit to Eastbourne, where my mother spent her last years. See also, in the Unsay Their Names folder of images, the text of the closing screen shot, featuring a photograph taken back home in Richmond, Virginia, on the day my mother died. I still have siblings and other close family in the UK, so I might yet add to this folder, even if I never make it back to Eastbourne.

 

Not all these images were captured in Eastbourne; I couldn't resist including one shot at Gatwick Station, while waiting for my train. I was reprimanded for taking it; at railway stations, I was told, this was illegal. I have learned not to idly point and shoot while in the UK. I was also reprimanded in the local park, and at the Eastbourne mall.

 

My mother and I liked to sit and look out the windows to the street. But another treat was to watch the rivulets made by the weekly window washer, squeegeeing the glass.

 

Jerry Uelsmann was the first photographer to make a portrait of a subject with her hands over her face, and the face showing through the fingers. He has been much imitated. This image of my mother in a beach chair was more about my own fears for her than her own. It was taken a year and a half before she died; she was still in pretty good shape.

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The sheep image was taken on a five mile walk along country roads to a care home where we planned to house her, as she began to need more constant care. She died before she set foot there. 

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