max s. gerber(the latest shot)

my mother hates nearly every picture i take of her, but through some maternal grace still allows me to take them. i think if tommy wasn’t here at the same time she never would’ve gone for it. it’s hard to refuse when you have an audience, even for the camera shy.

for the past few days i’ve been chasing a 6 week old kitten around the floor of my office, trying not to get my feet clawed and bitten. i’ve had to move fast and be vigilant. still, sometimes the little guy catches me, even though i’m watching him out of the corner of my eye [...]

today winona lost a long fight with kidney failure. i’d been giving her subcutaneous fluids every other day for a year and a half, but over the last month she deteriorated quickly. this morning i made the difficult decision to end her suffering. it was impossibly sad to see her decline so much, she could [...]

i have a different sort of relationship with doctors than most of my friends. doctors have always been a part of my life, as long as i can remember, though admittedly much less so now that i’m an adult. maybe my parents were nervous when i was a kid, maybe things were more precarious, maybe [...]

growing up i would’ve said i was a dog person. really. but winona is the cat of my life. amazing to think i got her seventeen years ago, at the beginning of my senior year of high school. she’s lived with me the past twelve years straight, through dog attacks, unfriendly room-mates, two lovely girlfriends [...]

i was born three months early, on a day that happened to be my grandmother’s birthday and my parents wedding anniversary. my mother always said i was an anniversary gift to my father. now, almost thirty five years later, i still have my father’s curls, his stubbornness and a mere fraction of his perfectly realized [...]

my mother and the new york times are inseparable. she spends a great deal of time pouring over the paper and sending me clippings. sometimes she figures out how to do this electronically, in which case i get three or four of the same email right in a row. my mother has done a great [...]