first time

I was wrong.

I set out to ask people about the first time they had intercourse. The answers I got were nothing like I expected. I began by interviewing both men and women, but I soon found that men's stories had no resonance-I asked at least a hundred men, and I got tales of drunkenness, of ineptitude, of disaster, of faulty recollection. To me the stories were one dimensional and uninteresting. Perhaps it was me.

Women's stories were entirely different. They remembered the colors, the smells, the furniture, the days before, the days after, and most of all, they recounted, in often excruciating detail, their emotions. During the four years it took to complete this project I spoke with hundreds of women -friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, and women I found through posting queries online.

Many of the women I interviewed were telling their stories for the first time. Some confessed, some screamed, some cried. It was often painful, it was sometimes a release. The more women I spoke to, the more I came to feel that many women were held hostage by their experiences. Some women said it was a relief to finally tell their story, that they wanted their secrets to be told.

I had the women write their stories and choose what to wear for the photo shoot. In the prints, I combined their images with their words. Although the photographs themselves are almost snapshot-like, the images are quite large-the prints are five feet wide and six to eight feet long-to confront the viewer with sheer magnitude of these women's stories, to take these huge secrets and expose them on a grand scale.

After outputting the prints, I used several techniques to indicate wear and tear, age and distress-I scratched them, I made holes, I rubbed them. And still, the images survive. I mean for them to look as if they've fallen out of an old album. Found at last, and each with its own story to tell.

There are twenty-five pieces in the series; nine are previewed on this website.