As We Rest in the Shadows

This is a photo project about two sisters & their connection to nature. With these photos & through black & white, I break away from repetitive, fear-inducing narratives & seek to reconstruct literary & photographic genres historically illustrated by men.

While driving through a small town in Tennessee a few years ago, I met two sisters who invited me on an adventure into their world. The landscapes they roamed became spaces for them to bond, rebel, tell secrets, and 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, and 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 and 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 and 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 the cautionary tale of Little Red Riding Hood, and from the historical stigmatization of witches and healers to modern cultural references such as Twin Peaks and True Crime, 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 and white photography, I aim to break away from fear-inducing repetitive narratives and seek to reconstruct both literary and photographic genres historically illustrated by men of their connection to nature or their attempts to dominate it.

My photographs meld the sisters' journey and my memories together in an attempt to return to my girlhood. Nostalgia continually reveals itself to be an immensely potent emotion when making this work: a relentless and uncontrollable yearning to revisit the past, while I’m fully aware of its inaccessibility. I have found that our deepest fear was not rooted in the stories passed down to us, but rather, an unspoken understanding existed among us, 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.