ABSTRACT
When someone asked the great portrait photographer Annie Leibowitz, “What is a photographer’s life?” she responded, “It’s just a life … working through a lens.” I cannot claim a photographer’s life of seeing through the camera’s lens every day, but I will be forever grateful to Karen Haberberg, who led a portfolio review class I attended, for giving me the confidence to see myself as a photographer. Once a month Haberberg’s class met at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, with a different composition of participants showing up each time. A few people returned from month to month, and I was one of the regulars. At the start of each meeting, people went around the room introducing themselves. My introduction always began with some variation of “I’m not really a photographer.” One day Karen interrupted and challenged my negation of a photographer’s identity. I had been showing my work for decades, and after that night it began to dawn on me that perhaps I was a photographer. My primary career identity as a psychoanalyst did not preclude identifying myself as an artist with a camera.
