My love of photography began when I was 11and my brother allowed me to enter his darkroom. The magic of the image emerging on a blank piece of paper as it sat in the developer has never left me.

Skipping ahead many years, I graduated from the University of Michigan, got married, and had 2 daughters. I became the neighborhood photographer and those black and white portraits of children still hang in the homes of their parents. When my youngest started school, I did too, studying photography at Wayne, Oakland and CCS and also taking workshops in Maine.

My early love of photography extends to the present, during those magic moments when the connection between me, as photographer, and the subject occur as I am shooting. This has been a great gift to me. That, and the unexpected surprises I find when studying the contact sheets, the joy of the parents when they see the finished product, along with the comment of a teenage boy who said as he was leaving the studio, "Hey, that was fun."

- Marcia Boxman