OVERVIEW
Greetings and welcome! For those who don't already know me, my name is Deb/Deborah/Debby Pacini, take your pick. I originally created this website in order to share my photo essay highlighting the extraordinary variety of shrines honoring the Virgin Mary and/or other saints that adorn so many front yards in my home city, Somerville, MA. Not so long ago the only way to have shared these photos and commentary would have been in a published book, which would have been prohibitively expensive even if I'd been able to find a publisher. Instead, I chose to "publish" online, and to share my Virgin Territory photo essay (and subsequent ones) for free. This photo essay went up in 2017.
More recently I began adding shorter photo essays and/or galleries that focus on similarly quirky and fascinating aspects of Somerville, which you can view under the tab Somerville Scenes.
Not being a digital native, I structured the content of the original Virgin Territory photo essay as if it were a book with thematic chapters, although I've had to adapt to the particular constraints—and opportunities—of a website. The end result is that my web-based photo essays have more photos and less text than most books, and more text and structure than most online photo portfolios.
As to the organization of my original Virgin Territory gallery: the About the Project page explains how this photo essay got started in the first place, while the Lenses navigation button lists the various "chapters" in the photo essay. The term lenses here does not refer to camera lenses, but rather, to the theme underpinning the selection of photos on that page.
All pages, including the newer Somerville Scenes galleries, scroll continuously, so keep scrolling down until it stops. I invite you to browse through the site, and hope you enjoy the views!
NOTE: these photo essays are best viewed on a computer. All of the photos are mine, with the exception of a few taken by my husband Reebee Garofalo, If you want to see one of the photos enlarged, just click on it!