“The Azores: Vignettes for Understanding.”

This project documents my four-year experience with Azoreans and their environment; its intent is to provide the basis for increasing our understanding and acceptance of other people.

I arrived on Terceira Island, Azores in the early ‘80s and was immediately fascinated with the people of this small Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. The strong Azorean focus on family, faith and hard agrarian work initially inspired my work. The resulting analog photographs record that culture. Each image invites you to learn about people that may be unfamiliar to you. However, their presentation here goes beyond a mere display of an interesting lifestyle.

The motivation for this project is inspired by two factors that conclude with the same benefit. First, are the basic tenets of Berger and Calabrese’s uncertainty reduction theory. This theory asserts that the more you know about people, the more likely it is that you will accept them. Second, anthropologists study people to fully appreciate the diverse nature of humanity and the wide range of variations within us. Reducing uncertainty about people and increasing our knowledge of them leads to a more favorable impression of them. Consequently, this approach eventually minimizes our prejudices and biases. This project concentrates on that motivation.

The Azores: Vignettes for Understanding is complete and stands on its own. However, it also advances the contrast between my other projects that introduce dissimilar cultures for direct comparisons. Singularly, or in comparison to those other projects, the hope is for you to learn of the diverse nature of humanity. It is through this new knowledge and the resulting reduction in uncertainty, that you might then increase your knowledge and acceptance of Azoreans.