Hazel was a beautiful hound with an extraordinary gift; she could sniff out a lost or discarded tennis ball lurking just about anywhere.  Down a cliff, up a tree, no matter how remote the location she would stubbornly bark until I dutifully helped her retrieve the beleaguered treasure and carry it home.  Eventually I began to photograph these long lost toys, not only to document her oddly endearing persistence, but to indulge my predilection for scientific observation. The whole routine fulfilled in me a growing impulse to capture and catalog every detail of whatever comes into my world as life speeds by. Only later, as the images emerged, did I realize the subtext of this daily chronicle;  I was anthropomorphizing these ratty bits of felt and rubber, imbuing them with nuanced human emotions: vaguely forlorn, at times triumphant, and almost always alluding to a harrowing narrative that will forever remain undisclosed.  

As it turns out, I was documenting the power of the human mind to fabricate empathy for even the most seemingly benign object.  I’ve been thinking a lot about how seldom we give each other the same benefit of the doubt.