Wood River Blue Pool

I grew up in the Middle West in a small blue-collar town on the Mississippi River. I began making portraits of women, girls, and their families as a way to look inward and remember, to question my surroundings, and to examine what felt like a kind of homelessness. From the mid-1980s through 2018 and beyond, photographed inside homes, backyards, and private gardens, intent on showing the complexities and forcefulness of inner life.

After all, the world I photograph is the world of my childhood. I have tried to make pictures from this place, the place of an insider, with all of the contradictions and ambivalence this implies. The women and girls in my portraits stand in as surrogates struggling with a conflict between heart and body. Within the embrace of domesticity and white privilege is an insidious moral pane inferred in the images by female affect and the covert violence of historical absence. Alton, Illinois, where I was born, has a long dark history of segregation, a place fraught with cruel racism with lingering Confederate sympathies. These histories are brought to the fore in an essay written by photographic historian and author Laura Wexler, which accompanied a book of these portraits, Wood River Blue Pool, ITI Press, 2018.

As I see it, the challenge is to break through an ancient and nearly impenetrable surface of vanity, and seek out the cracks, holes, and whorled places that hold our beauty, sadness, and pain. I understand my work much like one understands a rudimentary map. It is a modest effort to understand the diffuse and complicated scale of spirit, sensuality, and history.