Pictures of Birds

Before my mother descended into the underworld of dementia, she used to collect shells. Despite a preference of pool water over natural water, my parents chose to live and die near beaches. I’ve always feared that the shells she brought home would haunt her, and in turn would haunt me. That they weren’t meant to decorate bathrooms and the bottoms of drawers. Even when birds pick up shells for food, they leave behind the hard mineral remnants to disintegrate and be reborn as something else entirely. In this way and many others, I feel the presence of ghosts.

Pictures of Birds is a photographic series examining family, home, and mortality. Longboat Key, a Floridian island of condos and snowbirds, became the strange chosen backdrop of my parents’ fading health and their children’s mourning process. During my visits to Longboat Key, I immerse myself in the fears, aspirations, postures, gestures, and glances of people preoccupied with death and preservation. I encounter a home and a retirement community arranged to affirm health and security yet compromised by the ubiquity of illness and impermanence. I endeavor to photograph all this as well as what may suggest the cyclical and ineludible nature of death and regeneration, acts of transubstantiation, psychological adaptations, and spiritual transformations. I try to embrace the reality that my camera is always looking inward at who I am, what I fear losing, and how I want to be remembered.

Now my mother sees ghosts while she’s sleeping and while she’s awake. Her body suspended in liminal space. I sit with her when I can and ask the ghosts to tread gently as we simultaneously die and are reborn as something else entirely. Some of the ghosts are my ancestors. Some are angels. All are birds.