Why I decided to expand the original scope of my forthcoming book –DINING ALONE In the Company of Solitude →
It's been a difficult time in our world and I hope peace will find it's way to Ukraine, soon.
My forthcoming book, DINING ALONE In the Company of Solitude, published by Daylight Books, is slated for a spring release. I am proud, honored and ever so grateful that Laura Pressley, Executive Director at CENTER, in Santa Fe, wrote a beautiful, and well researched foreword for my book. I have so many people to thank who helped bring this book into the world and I will do that in the coming months.
As many of you are aware, this series and book project was long in the making. I wanted to have it professionally designed to help me envision it in book form. Bonnie Briant, designed the book for me in 2020. Though I was ready to get it published, shortly afterwards, I had an ephipany. I was enjoying a cup of coffee, alone, in a semi-outdoor dining space at Charle's Prime Rib in the West Village. I had lived in the West Village for twenty five years after my college years and it remains one of my favorite places to be.
I kept thinking about the COVID-19 Pandemic and how obviously isolated so many had become. Of course, my dear mother, 92 at the time was at the top of my list. She lived in an elder care community on the upper west side. Though she had frequent visits from her family, and several friends whom she kept up with, during the lockdown, she and so many elders quite alone and being isolated was an uncomfortable predicament for them. Behind the red velvet curtains of this west village dining space, I thought about how extraordinary and upsetting it was to be living through a pandemic –a part of history. Though I did not want to, I believed I simply had to expand the scope of my DINING ALONE book project. It had to include a second part which came to be called 'Part II –The Universal and Timely.' These outdoor dining spaces were being constructed in some of the big cities and towns world-wide. They had heaters and windows and many of them were completely open on one side. They looked like giant dioramas to me, and also reminded me of the 5' X 9' sets that I had constructed when working on an experiential film about the experience of dining alone in 1999, while working on my thesis at the School of Visual Arts' Photography, Video and Related Media Department where Charles Traub, is Chairman of the Department. I was very interested in the moving image and in editing the real and the unreal together using non-linear video editing.
I started to photograph many of the outdoor dining spaces which were as interesting to me as my lone diner subjects. The landscape of New York City felt different. It felt as surreal to me as when I saw the hospital tents being constructed across from Mount Sinai Hospital, in Central Park West at the cusp of the pandemic. The pandemic had brought the concept of isolation into sharp focus. Somehow, I felt that it also helped us all to come to terms with our aloneness. We were isolated from one another, and paradoxically so connected to each other since we were all susceptible to this deadly virus. So began I began Part II of my book. The book, highlights the experience of being alone in public. I used peopled restaurant interiors as a metaphor to explore the complexities of the subject of solitude.
For more information about DINING ALONE In the Company of Solitude, please visit my website. I am proud to be offering 100 signed books with signed limited edition prints for PRE-ORDERING. (Unsigned copies of the book can also be purchased from Daylight Books.) I will donate 50% of all the proceeds for the signed books and special edition, signed prints to CaringMatters and Jasa, both of which have stellar reputations, especially, in providing support to elders.
