As We Rest in the Shadows

Through history, stories & beliefs have been passed down that have created distance between the natural & the feminine. Young girls are taught to stay on the path, to never stray, and to believe that danger waits for them in the landscape.

While passing through a small town in Tennessee in 2019, I met two sisters who invited me on the start of an adventure into their world. The landscapes they roamed became spaces for them to bond, rebel, tell secrets, & rest without observation. This reminded me of my own girlhood and the summers I spent wandering through the lakes, woods, brush, and rivers with my girl cousins while we transformed the landscape into one that was just girl and just us. Fairy tales, urban legends, & our parents alike told us the only thing girls would meet in nature was harm or a harsh lesson to be learned. While we were warned not to stray from the path, our curiosity & desire always rose above our fear. The light wove itself through the trees and pulled us into the depths; there, we were free to disappear into the lush woods & dark waters where we were closest to ourselves. We felt we were the first to discover these spaces, maybe even the first people on Earth, or perhaps it felt like we were the last.

From Genesis’ creation story to cautionary fairy tales, from the historical stigmatization of witches and healers to modern cultural references like Twin Peaks and true crime media, these stories have cast a shadow of fear over women throughout history, creating distance between the natural and feminine. Within this body of work and through the use of black & white photography, I aim to break away from fear-inducing repetitive narratives, and seek to reconstruct both literary & photographic genres historically illustrated by men of their connection to nature or attempts to dominate it. Within this narrative reconstruction, my work also provokes a reevaluation: while young boys' behavior is often regarded as more weighty, young girls' actions are dismissed as light-hearted– my work also asks why the play of girls is considered less significant.

My photographs meld the sisters' journey and my memories together in an attempt to return to my girlhood. Nostalgia reveals itself to be an immensely potent emotion when making this work: a relentless and uncontrollable yearning to revisit the past while fully aware of its inaccessibility. I have found that my deepest fear was not rooted in the stories passed down to us, but from the unspoken understanding we all shared, knowing we’d eventually have to leave this place. The light that drew us in shifted to shadows that loomed over us– a reminder of time itself.

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I began this project in 2019 and have returned often to visit the girls in their hometown in Tennessee. I plan to complete this body of work by this October 2025, with a couple final trips to see and photograph them. As they grow older and step into a new chapter of life, it feels like the right time to bring this project to a close. While I’ll continue to photograph them in the years ahead, this particular story is reaching its natural ending and will be completed within this year. As for presenting this work in book form, I have many ideas for how the images could live and speak to each other on the page. That said, I remain very open and hopeful to collaborate with a publisher who brings expertise and vision to the process beyond my own.