“Held in Time” is a series of portraits created during my 50th high school reunion.
We tend to think of high school reunions as opportunities to reconnect with old friends and revisit familiar places. But returning after fifty years requires a certain courage—it asks us to relinquish vanity, to face the fact that we no longer look the same as we did when we left. Inevitably, comparisons will be drawn. We can think of this as aging, or we can think of it as progress. There is a reckoning in this act. Subjecting oneself to such scrutiny takes humility and self-awareness—qualities not everyone is willing to summon. This realization gave rise to an idea for a photographic project.
I traveled from Los Angeles to my boarding school, Loomis Chaffee in Windsor, Connecticut, carrying a full studio setup: lights, backdrop, and a medium-format camera on a tripod. I set up in the common room of the dormitory that housed our class for the reunion weekend. From a list of likely attendees, I returned to my tattered 1975 yearbook and printed copies of the original studio portraits taken back then.
My idea was simple: to ask classmates to hold those old portraits while I photographed them anew. Before taking each picture, I worked with each sitter to study their original pose—the angle of the shoulders, the direction of the eyes, the tilt of the head—seeking to echo the composition of the original image as faithfully as possible.
This process gave me the unexpected gift of connection. I engaged not only with old friends but also with classmates I had scarcely known back then.
The result is both an act of remembrance and of re-seeing—a meditation on time, identity, and connection.
This project carries a particular personal resonance. It was at Loomis under the guidance of Walter Rabetz that I discovered how essential photography would become to my life. Indeed the very first rolls of film I ever shot were processed in a darkroom only a few yards from where these pictures were taken. It takes only one great teacher to alter the course of one’s life. For me, that teacher was Walter. It is in his honor that I present this portfolio of photographs.
