honor bright
2015 - 2022
“Honor Bright” was a phrase my dad used to use—his way of putting an exclamation point on the ending of a good story. Later I learned its dictionary meaning: honest, truthful, honor bound. It suited him perfectly.
My father served in Europe from 1944 until the end of WWII. Like many of his generation, he rarely spoke about what he witnessed as an infantry soldier. Only after he died, when I found a folder of letters he’d written home, did I begin to understand. Those letters trace five campaigns and reveal, in real time, how a year of constant combat—June 1944 through May 1945—shaped him.
Later in life he developed a form of dementia linked to the blast trauma he experienced during the war. Research from Us Against Alzheimer’s shows that veterans face heightened risks tied directly to service: PTSD, depression, traumatic brain injury, successive concussions, and blast-induced neurotrauma. My dad lived to 97, ultimately losing his life to this dementia.
This project has allowed me to walk beside him—to learn more about the emotional and mental toll of war, and to better understand his loyalty, his views on service, and the weight he carried long after coming home. Like many veterans, he was proud of his service but longed to set the memories aside. Of course, that was nearly impossible.
The framed text below appeared in the exhibition Soldiers Lens at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa, 2025.
A 7” x 10” hand-constructed pamphlet-stitch book accompanies the series, pairing my photographs with text from his 1944–45 letters. Printed on BFK Rives paper with images archival-printed on Hahnemühle Agave and tipped in.
