Life takes a person on some strange journeys, but this is a journey I will treasure forever, and just maybe beyond. Old found photos, the portfolio I call Confabulations, set it off, stirring cosmic dust my way long after the project was completed. Was it because the old abandoned photos were imbued with an overwhelming family spirit, or was it that Tom and I, feeling orphaned in New York, had adopted these pictures as our own family, and the photos obliged, making the whole thing become so weirdly and completely a deep spiritual mythology in our lives?

My great great grandfather came in a letter. An unknown distant cousin found my name in a magazine about the found photos. He guessed I was a descendant of Pierre Gentieu, French immigrant ancestor, Civil War veteran. He told me Pierre was a photographer and Pierre's photos are archived in a museum. I had no idea.

I wasted no time finding out about my long-lost ancestor, spending much of the following two years in the darkroom printing his original glass-plate negatives. I made a hand-bound album of the silver prints, satisfied that my Pierre project was completed. But then I found other branches of the Gentieu family and a cornucopia of family history in letters, photos and other mementos left by Pierre and his children. In the years that followed, my interest in Pierre grew from what he did in the world to who he was in his heart.

Pierre's Camera is the story of the rediscovery of a modest gentleman whose clear compassionate eye was the first to photograph the lifestyle and struggle of nineteenth-century American explosives industry workers, and whose courage to follow his heart no matter what, has inspired me to follow my own.