In order to live, 2025 - 2026
On the playground growing up, children would cast me as the younger sister, the mother, or even the dog in a game of “house”. I watched little plastic soldiers battle each other and cars drive down the slide as if it was a road or a race track. Imagination grabbed me by the hands, pulled me out of my slumber, and spun me around very fast. It was a way to know I was alive, and that I was human.
I think of these images as stories and me as the storyteller. What I choose to include in the photographic frame will become part of the image, and the story. I can distort people with space: make them blurry, or reflect them back in a mirror. I’m not necessarily faithful to reality. No great storyteller I’ve ever known has been.
When starting this project, I spent a summer day recreating images from Blueberries for Sal, a children’s book read to me in my grandmother’s house. I wanted to capture a feeling that existed only in my youth. But remembering my innocence has been hard, because in reality I’m closer to forgetting. Life has gotten in the way.
I’m consistently told to explore the dark feelings that my images hold. The reality is that I don’t know why these images feel the way they do. I make them instinctually, and I don’t see the darkness until after the fact. Maybe this is the manner in which my past seeps into my present, my lost innocence I thought I’d forgotten. Maybe I remember more than I think.
When someone sits down to write a story, they are starting with a blank paper. One has to pull from their imagination: what has happened, or what they want to make happen. To me, the whiteness of a blank paper can be blinding, which is why I don’t write much. When making photographs, our world is our blank canvas. It is only blinding if you look at the sun too long.
What I’ve been able to record in my images, I couldn’t with the written word. Starting with nothing is too daunting. When forced to interact with the world to find meaning, I have allowed myself to be surprised. I embark out to my surroundings and go from there. There is more fear and less comfort. I trust strangers, and let my intuition take the wheel. When it clicks, in the split seconds between normal heartbeats, when the expression, hand gesture, or light is finally right, this is where I find the magic. Now, I’ve made a new friend.
The trajectory of my project went from specific scenes of children’s literature, to fairy tales, to moments that are closer to my own reality. The photographs are made both through staging and simply observing, and made with both people I love and total strangers. They seesaw between what I know and what I’m learning. At the same time, I couldn’t tell you what I’ve learned or even what I know for sure. What I can do is show you the pictures.