Two Good Hands
The winter of 2019-2020 I noticed a number of hand portraits amongst the photos I’d taken over the past five years and began to gather them together, with no clear intention of how I would use them. As the collection grew, the chorus of this song by Charlie King came into my head:
“And all who know these two good arms
know I’d never have to rob or kill,
I can live by my own two hands and live well
and all my life I have struggled
to rid the earth of all such crimes”
In March I began to prepare the images for exhibition while the world was shutting down to stem the transmission of a new virus. In midst of a pandemic, as the future seemed so uncertain, the photos’ reminder of our propensity for creation over destruction was even more important. The hand portraits testify to our potential to care for each other, work hard, and create beautiful things.
The song, that still runs through my head regularly, was inspired by the true story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant Italian men who were executed in 1927 for a crime at least one of them did not commit. In the final stages of printing and mounting, as I read up on the circumstances around Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrest and trial and the international outcry about their sentencing and execution, I saw parallels to recent and ongoing protests in the US and abroad.
The images were printed in Burlington by LeZot Camera, on paper handmade by Gayle Fitzpatrick in Maine, and shown at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester Vermont, 4 July-16 August 2020. All photos were taken in Vermont, Qatar, Maine, and Massachusetts.