Flowers Drink the River

Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the backwoods of central Maine.

Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of my gender transition, as I photograph my small community in rural central Maine, and the beauty and terror of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Using a large format film camera and careful analogue techniques, I look for an entrancing, mystical presence in my daily experiences amidst the forests, fields, and rivers surrounding my home. This work is a search for beauty and escape, resistance and safety in a culture often at odds with these practices.

 My photographs begin with patient acts of co-creation. I stage delicate sculptures out of spider silk, flowers, and other natural materials, then wait as the land and water, wind, light, or a stray moth, begin to interact with them in unpredictable ways. Sometimes the creation takes the form of building trust with animals, carefully, over many nights as they become comfortable with my presence. 

Each night for a week in august I would sit in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard covered in Scent Killer Gold, wearing a ghillie suit, holding a tray full of crushed apples in one hand, and a 30 foot makeshift shutter release cable attached to my 4×5 camera in the other hand. The same family of deer would get more comfortable with my presence each night. Eventually they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. The following Tuesday I would have my first hrt consultation. I was keeping it a secret, knowing there was no way I could safely transition in this place, but also no way I could hide my changing body over the following months and years.

Flowers Drink the River combines carefully staged portraits of my working class trans and queer friends, lovers, and chosen family who are part of this small community, with dreamlike photographs of the fluid and natural world around us. This work attempts to show an alternative to the masculine and extractive history of the medium that emphasizes journalistic purity or documentary truth. Each exposure shows an act of care, a relationship built over time and trust.