Vision and Verb is a collaboration of women of a certain age who have a passion for photography and writing, or who have a passion for one and a willingness to grow and develop the skills in the other.  What exactly does “women of a certain age” mean?  It means that we are women in the prime of our lives, slightly older women whose children are grown or mostly grown.  We are also women who’ve never had children, single women, married women, straight women, gay women, women who live in the country or the city or a foreign land.  Above all, we are women who have had life experiences and the desire to share those experiences and our unique perspectives with you.

[Click on the person's name and their personal blog site will open in a new window.]

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Marcie Scudder – Massachusetts, U.S.A.

My passion and interest for the visual world and photography began at a very young age. As a child I  was the proud owner of a Kodak Instamatic camera that I used to capture anything and everything in my knee-high world. In high school, I received my first SLR camera as a gift, and became quite quickly obsessed with darkroom processing and printing.

Although trained, educated and working professionally as an architect, I never once stopped practicing photography. Throughout all of my college and adult years, I  was known to always carry a camera, turning my lens on anything and everything that captivated and moved me. In 2004, I retired my old analog SLR in exchange for a digital one, and a whole new world of creative opportunity opened to me.

A true believer in daily practice, I am out with my camera every day recording the world as I see it thru my particular lens. The magic happens in the moments and transitions between the poses…the beauty is in the unexpected and everyday ordinary. By using natural light and whatever the moment presents, I aim to capture the hidden beauty and emotion that lies beyond the obvious. I like to catch the fleeting art of life – both the messy and the magical all at once and together.

From my home studio, I work as an architect specializing in residential design. I am passionate about yoga – and like my photography – practice daily, using its teachings as sources of inspiration and focus. A mother of three almost-grown children, and still married after all of these years, I live in a suburb just west of Boston.

The process and possibility of combining both word and image is what has sparked this blog. I, along with Toni Johnson, am one of the co-founders of Vision and Verb.

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Toni Johnson – Eastern Washington, U.S.A.

I am a natural light photographer living in the Columbia Basin of Washington state, which is prime ground for agriculture.  That’s a good thing since my day job is as an accounting assistant for a large farm, which provides for a variety of photo opportunities from planting to harvest, farm hands to machinery, and everything in between.

My boss has often accused me of being anal - and that is a good thing at work. It also best explains my love of “focusing on the details” and of macro photography.  I find beauty in the smallest of details and I strive to share that beauty in my images.

My love for photography started at an early age with a Kodak Instamatic camera – they were popular little things at the time.  I was also fascinated with Polaroids and loved to give the photo a completely unnecessary shake and blow to help “speed” up the processing. When my children were little I had a Canon T50 35mm film camera, which I used for almost twenty years – and I still have it.  My first digital SLR was also a Canon – a Rebel XTi.  I just added a Canon 7D to my equipment list.  (I’m in love!)

My spare time is spent in building my budding portrait studio.  I also spend time with my two dogs – a Springer Spaniel named Buddy and a Boston Terrier named Buster – and when time allows, you’ll find me in my kilnformed glass studio.  I am the mother to two adult sons who live at opposite ends of the state, plus a recently added daughter-in-law, and love it when I get the opportunity to hang out with my kids.

I am proud to say that I’m one of the co-founders of Vision and Verb, along with Marcie Scudder.

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Margie Kardash – Ontario, Canada

My name is Margie Kardash, soon to be 57 years old, living in Ottawa, Canada. I blog alternate days with my sister, Kath at soeursdujour.com.

I was happily married for 24 years when I lost my husband to cancer, leaving me alone with our four children.  My youngest is twenty years old now and in his second year of university.  I nod my head to his siblings for the love and guidance they have given him.  When their father died, he was only nine years old, far too young to experience such an upheaval.  I know that families can be blown to bits by such a trauma.  In our case the family fell into a hole and climbed out by standing on each other’s shoulders, youngest first, and then pulling the last one out as a team.  The protective nurturing required to weather a storm leaves a lasting closeness that is ultimately weatherproof.

A few years ago I reconnected with my first boyfriend, Andy.  Our large family now includes my four, his two, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.  We are downsizing our lives, from a six bedroom house to a condominium.  Hopefully this downsize will upsize my time to focus on the things I love: my photography, reading and writing.

I bought my first camera the week after my first daughter was born.  A Minolta, 35 mm.  I wore it out taking photos of my children.  Two years ago I bought a Nikon D40 supplemented with a few lenses, a move up from my Canon point and shoot.  I have had a few strokes, yes I am pretty good now, thanks for asking, and all of a sudden this camera thing became a hobby.  Then a passion.  Now a learning experience.  My other passion is music.  I cannot carry a tune, but I can listen to music endlessly.

Photography excites me and disappoints me at the same time.  I go out each day and visit your blogs, I look at your photos, I look at mine, and I think, mmm??  Why them and not me?  I want to grow and progress and expand and develop and learn…you get my drift. I am a visual person, seeing and looking at everything all of the time.  As my friend Robin Bird has told me before, it is a pilgrimage and I am excited to be involved in this collaboration.

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Eliza Deacon – Tanzania

I’ve been living in Africa for the past 15 years, first Botswana and more recently Tanzania. I was traveling the world, came to Africa and never left.  Photography has always been my passion; after studying it at college in the UK, I went to work for Reuters news agency as a pictures sub-editor for 4 years. That still remains one of the most incredible times of my life and I learned much from the photographers I worked with. I wanted to be a photojournalist more than anything but, being young and lacking confidence, it never  quite came together. So it goes. Much as I loved being involved in the news, the real world – and real life – beckoned and so in late 1993 I  went to Bosnia and drove aid trucks in and out of Sarajevo amongst other things. That was also an amazing time, for good and bad reasons, and another learning curve (quite a steep one).

After Bosnia came Botswana (thank goodness you’re moving through the alphabet, my father said), and 9 years spent in the company of elephants. The camera, which had been dormant for a few years, resurfaced, but sadly the lack of any good photo labs in the area made for frustrating shooting. Tanzania and the digital age arrived, and it all came together again. Now I sometimes work with a journalist based here, and we’ve done work for the UK press which we both enjoy. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to travel quite a lot: Mozambique and an amazing women’s community project on an island up in the north, Egypt which took my breath away, Morocco and time spent in the thin air of the Atlas mountains, and then of course there’s day-to-day life in Tanzania. My boyfriend is a coffee farmer, he farms Arabica coffee on the slopes of Kilimanjaro and that is the place I love to be more than anywhere else.  However, not at all reluctantly, I do also come down off my mountain to do the marketing for a small safari company based just outside of Arusha.

I’ve always been a Nikon girl, since Reuters days, but recently purchased the Canon G10 which is always in my bag and comes in very useful when the bigger camera seems too obvious.

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Frida – Sweden

I’m a woman who celebrates the winter solstice as a turning point of new things to come. I live in a small town in the lower middle of Sweden with my husband and four children, two of whom have already moved out to live on their own. I have always been interested in photography and you could find me everywhere with my camera.  I see images everywhere I go, when I’m driving, walking or shopping, images just pops up in my head. The first digital camera was an awakening to new things. I’m happily snapping away lots and lots of images every day. My family has learnt to be patient when I just want to take “one more”. I’m a reg. nurse by profession, a work I love but life always takes its own peculiar ways and now I’m learning to live in a different pace. I try to live every day to the fullest and that’s were the photography comes in.

Closest to my heart lay all the little things we usually just pass without thinking. Such as tiny flowers, bugs or just an ordinary item that gets so much more fascinating when you look really close. The apple of my eye (granddaughter) is also in focus in my viewfinder nowadays. The whole process of choosing the object to shoot, downloading them to my computer and process them more or less is a joy every time. I often discover images I like later on when looking through them for the onehundredandeleventhtime.

Camera type and lenses and stuff like that are only interesting to me in the manner that they should work properly and that they do the things I want. I take the picture I like and present them on my blog. I’m so thankful for “meeting” all the new friends online and to get all the good and constructive feedback on my images. It has also lead to possibilities to learn new things about photography. Every new day has a challenge ahead. One new exciting challenge for me is that I with participating in this project also have to put words to my images, in a language different to my own Swedish.

So I’m a happy amateur in photography and I always have my camera bag with me.  If you’ll ever see a tall woman with brown hair and a red camera bag……….

- It might be me!

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Sue Henry – Tennessee, U.S.A.

For as long as I can remember I have been involved with the arts.

Upon my retirement from a highly rewarding career as a music educator and professional musician I was looking for a new creative and artistic outlet.  Remembering the fun times with photography my now grown son and I had experienced many years ago, I chose photography as my medium and purchased a new DSLR camera.  The rest is history!

I read every photography book I can get my hands on, attend photography classes and workshops as frequently as I can, spend way too much time on the internet viewing and enjoying the work of others, and, like so many, have been totally bitten by the photography bug!

Unlike many people who use photography to record memories, I strive to use photography as a tool for creating art.   My passion for finding beauty in what may be sometimes considered unexpected places is very evident to the viewer.  Nature, rust, and intimate details of common objects found in our amazing world often become the subjects of my images; images which frequently are made from a more abstract perspective.   I enjoy experimenting with unique photographic techniques and effects, both in-camera and through post processing.

On my photography blog (http://suehenryphotography.wordpress.com) I frequently will pair a thought provoking quote with an image which often brings a poetic side to a given image.

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Ginnie Hart – Netherlands

At age 65, life appears to have come back around full circle in the timing and invitation of these two simple words:  Vision and Verb.  It’s a longer story than this, of course, but….

I was born #3 of 8 kids to a preacher in Michigan who understood Verb and a mother who, as an English teacher and musician, lived it.  I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a degree in Linguistics because I wanted to work with indigenous languages that had not yet been written.  I did that for awhile in Peru, back before I was married.  Verb.

Once married, I worked with my husband for 16 years in a ministry to college students, teaching them how to interpret ancient texts from the Bible through inductive reasoning in the context of culture and history.  During the time when fundamentalist women struggled with whether their holy scriptures allowed them to preach or not, I was privileged to do widespread seminars on Women and the Church in both California and Wisconsin.  Verb.

Then the marriage of 21 years crumbled when it became clear I was gay, always had been, and was living in 2 worlds, not knowing how to reconcile Verb with the truth of who I was/am.  Coming from a conservative preacher’s home did not help me.  Garbage in, garbage out…a process on which I’m still working, with God still as bedrock.  The good of it was 2 wonderful children, who are now grown (Amy is 37; Mark is 33), and a delightful grandson, Nicholas, age 9.

That transition to living as a gay woman, beginning in 1990, opened me up to Vision:  Vision of not only who I am but who I could be in living my Truth.  It meant living through several relationships before finding my Dutch partner here in the Netherlands through my photography blog at Shutterchance.  And thus my move from the USA to Holland in early December, 2009, to pursue marriage in a country that recognizes it!  Vision.  The word/Verb becoming flesh.

As in life, I’m an amateur photographer who learns by observing and then doing.  My camera is a DSLR Canon with good lenses, but it’s still Vision that makes or breaks me.  Photoshop helps me bring the Vision to close approximation of what I see in my artistic mind.  The rest is just trying to figure it all out…flying by the seat of my pants.

Verb and Vision.  Vision and Verb.  I really like the Journey this is and want to embrace it with open arms!  We’re all kids at heart, never too old to learn, right?

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Kathleen Stewart - Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada

I blog with my sister, Margie, on a site called souersdujour.com.    Neither of us speak French, but we wanted a name that conveyed our joint life as sister/partners.   Sisters every day, every day sisters.

By day I’m a legal secretary and by night I enjoy life with my husband of seven years.  He was a beau many years ago and a chance meeting 25 years later brought us together.  Marriage brought with it a move from the only city I had ever lived in, an “I quit” to a job that I had been working at for 20 years and a dynamic shift in who I thought I was.   Happiness, contentment, love and the support of a highly creative husband has inspired me to start searching for the creative me.   I am not an artist, not yet.  I’m crafty and an amateur photographer.  I know that I create all the time, decorating our home, knitting, some sewing, taking pictures and I am passionate about food and cooking.  It seems I am finding more and more happy accidents in my work, I’ve made something that takes my breath away but they are, for now, still a surprise to me.  I am striving to be more deliberate in my creative endeavours and hope to take my photos and work to the next level.

Photography?  Ah yes, the vision part of these words.  I stumbled into it with a point & shoot camera and would tag along with my husband while he was out with his old Canon film camera.   I moved to an SLR digital at the same time as my sister and that was the spark for our blog, we thought we could learn together even though many miles separate us.

On becoming a woman of a certain age which, as we know, is a gradual but undeniable process, I remember one of my first realizations was this:  Short hair and sweater sets are not a fashion statement, they are a medical necessity!   Granted the hair cuts are stylish and not the helmet perms of our mothers and the sweater sets are not a soft pink wool with pearl buttons, but a hoody and a tank top, they’re part of my life.   As my brain is getting rewired and my body is shifting things around (downward it would seem) for the second half, the latter half, the mid of life, I find I look in the mirror and am delighted with who I am.

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Petra – Netherlands

My name is Petra, and for art and the web I carry the name POBSB. I live in Tilburg, a city in the south of the Netherlands, half an hour drive away from Antwerp, with my husband and my dog called Ventje (which is Dutch for ‘little guy’). I used to be an IT-professional, but 10 years ago I took a sabbatical leave for half a year. I enjoyed it so much that I prolonged it for another 6 months and after that I quit my job and never went back.

My art started in the 80’s with ink and rice paper, sumi-E, (trying) to do Japanese Calligraphy. I was and still am fascinated by this technique; the power of a single brushstroke is overwhelming. I started to paint in the old eastern tradition, but being European in this day and age I had to find my own way. The technique stayed the same, but I don’t do the traditional images. Since 2000 I do live model drawing once a week, which I wouldn’t miss for the world.  Please check out http://pobsb.nl/ for my art.

I must confess that I started photography because it’s digital. I love seeing the result immediately and being able to play with it on the computer. I always carry my camera, and take pictures everyday and then spend (too much) time on the computer viewing and processing. I feel that I am still searching for my own ‘handwriting’ in photography. More than just a pretty picture, I want to make a POBSB-picture.

Last year I joined a photo group called TEMA - http://fotogroeptema.blogspot.com/ is our site. This group is all about making artistic series - 2 or 4 pictures telling a story, showing a mood.

On my blog however I like to post new pictures, usually not older than a week or two, and because of the worldwide aspect of the web, I like to show where I live, everyday life around me. More like a journal.

Computer art brought together my love for drawing, painting, photography and IT. It is art the other way around, first you concentrate on the image and after that you decide: how big; on paper, canvas, wallpaper or glass, maybe a t-shirt. So many possibilities!

Like Frida it is a new challenge for me to put words to my images, especially in English.

I am honoured to be a collaborator and strive to share with you the everyday things that make me tick.

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Puna Miller – Maryland, U.S.A.

As I stumble ungracefully into middle life, I finally feel life is leading me. I find that best reflected in my new passion, photography. I am a photographer of opportunity - a chance or serendipitous event is most rewarding.

I studied physics, I am combat trained, I am mom, I am wife, I am dog lover. By day I am a systems administrator and webmaster. By night I am cook and cabbie. I necessarily teach fitness classes. And I am always a wife, mom and photographer. And yes, I am a Jesus freak.

After years of living abroad, I have settled of sorts, physically and spiritually. There is dust behind my refrigerator and under my bed. I now find myself doing and loving the mundane. The ordinary is finally fascinating to me. I think it tends to ground a soul. I run the documentary that is my family’s life. Every event is precious and every event is documented, much to the chagrin of my children!

Every once in a while I get a stirring from my wanderlust heart and I have to fly…somewhere.

But then it’s wonderful to be home again. Home again to my surroundings and my soul. I blog at lifesignatures.org. I am excited to be here at Vision and Verb. It is my new home.

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Silvia Ganora – Italy

I’m an Italian amateur photographer. I started taking pictures when I was in my teens, thanks to my parents gift: a Kodak Instamatic… and haven’t stopped since! Over the years, the Kodak was replaced with several other film cameras  and, now that I made my leap into digital photography, I’m using a Nikon d70.

At seventeen I had the fantastic opportunity to live in the USA for a whole year. I attended High School and fell in love with this wonderful country. When my uncle had to move to Mexico for work, my aunt and I decided to join him: we traveled by car coast-to-coast and then down to Mexico City. The most exciting car ride I’ve ever had in my life!

My parents had me after 13 years of marriage, so when they soon grew old and fell ill I had to take care of them. Having a High School diploma from teacher training school together with a Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English gave me the opportunity to give private English lessons to children and High School students for many years.

Traveling is also one of my passions. I love to explore new locations taking pictures with my camera. I really regret having a film camera at the time I visited Tunisia and when I spent a month alone on the Greek island of Karpathos. I keep saying to myself I must take the time to scan all those slides…

After living in Sicily for several years, I’m about to move back to ‘my’ mountains with the love of my life. My parents both passed away years ago and now I dedicate most of my time to photography. Over the years, I’ve participated to various international photography contests and was awarded several honorable mentions and also a win.

You can learn more about my photography and my photographic achievements by visiting my website silviaganoraphotography.com.

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Marion – Ireland

My name is Marion, and I live and work in Ireland, at the west coast. The tiny village (282 souls, a pub and a lot of bog and sheep) in which I live in is not too far from Galway city and lies at the shores of Lough Corrib.

I am a flamboyant and extroverted person who loves the good things in life, which is sort of visible around the waist by now, but black clothes are the best invention ever, and dishwashers of course!! You can find me attached to a camera on different occasions and locations, where I try and capture the ‘Emerald Isle’ as I see it through my eyes and emotions. Many of my photos can be found in the different galleries on my website www.flashandflair.ie.

In daily life I am a mother of two, one of each kind actually, and I must say both my husband and myself did a not-too-bad job with those kids, as they both have found their way in life, and are fully independent, so I can hold back on helping them through life as they are doing brilliantly themselves. This gives me more time to do what I like most. And that all seems to be on the creative side. I like choreographing and directing opera’s and musicals, I like to pretend to be a musician myself by singing all day long, I am totally addicted to music anyway!! I love to write a little, and occasionally I do some drawing or painting. On a professional level I do photo restoration and retouching and I have my own business doing so.

I came into contact with photography very early in life, as from the age of 6 months my father used to stick me in the very deep top drawer of his antique solid oak desk, pillow behind my back and under my bottom for comfort, while he would do his sorting out of negatives and glueing pictures in albums. When I was a bit older I used to lean against the table in his dark room, chin resting in my hand, and silently, so I wouldn’t disturb him, watch him develop his films into beautiful prints while sniffing in the distinct scent of the chemicals he used and listening to an opera playing on his little tape recorder. Every time I smell something similar my mood brightens up, as those are priceless and very dear memories! And Lakmé’ s flowerduet to me has no association with flowers, but with photography.

Trivia:
Odd cravings like munching a cheese and chocolat sprinkles sandwich
Having size 1 (UK adult size)  for shoes
Have Never worn a dress in my life (except on stage, but that doesn’t count)
Must be the only female left worldwide without pierced ears
Have been George Clooney’s secret lover for 31 years
Have been daydreaming regularly for the past 31 years

Any questions?? Ask!

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Kelly Letky – Upstate, NY U.S.A.

I am… graphic artist, jewelry artist, writer, photographer, image maker, wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, runner, reader, gardener, knitter, housekeeper, decorator, crazy cat lady with a dog. Not necessarily in that order.

For the past 17 years, I have worked professionally as a freelance graphic artist. And for the last five as a jewelry designer as well. I am blessed enough, and lucky enough, to work out of my home. I can’t imagine having to go to an outside office every day after having done this for so long.

I am an amateur at many things. I started writing when I was a teenager. If there is one thing that I cannot not do, it is that.

I am a loner, an introvert. Socializing takes a lot out of me. I need lots of space, and time alone. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love people.

I am learning, as I move through this “certain age,” to love, truly love, humanity. (And I wish I’d figured that out much sooner.)

I am learning. That in itself is a good description of me. I am curious, driven. I always need a challenge. When I was young, a teenager, I always felt I was a bit different. It took me a number of years to figure out that I was feeling the desire to create. Years later, I realized that we are all creative, we are all different, yet still, we are all the same. Part of the same human condition.

And I am an artist… depending on how you define it. I believe that if you sit down and do the work, go through the process, open the vein and let your soul bleed out, then you are an artist. That doesn’t mean you will be a Van Gogh, a Hemingway, an Adams. But you will be an artist. I believe that anyone can draw or write or take a beautiful photo with enough hard work and practice. Enough commitment. Enough heart.

Talent is a separate issue. Some people are born with a talent for one thing, others a talent for something else.

The trick is to figure out where you fall. And I am still working on that part…