Tenacious Nostalgia

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My photographs evoke the enigmatic memories of my childhood. My models are close friends and family, and through them, I represent my feelings about the passage of time and changing female identity. I work from my intuition to capture my models and their surroundings. My images are not posed but naturally conceived. They are both voyeuristic and nostalgic.

Sometimes it feels good to look at ourselves in a vanity, to play out a character that we’ve noticed in movies or books. Sometimes make believe becomes reality. So we touch ourselves, we hold ourselves, we fall over our own feet, we laugh and we cry. We close ourselves up. We get restless, reckless. We open our hearts to a myth, to the bad boys, to the erotic nature of decadence and fleeting moments of bliss. We are not the teenagers in our parent’s house anymore, hiding in our rooms to escape everyone that doesn’t understand. But we still cross our hearts and hope. We look into the mirror, and when it’s too hard to look into our own eyes, our own reflection, sometimes we will gaze down and see too clearly.

Sometimes I would sit at the edge of my Dad’s pickup truck and dangle my feet, hunching forward with my hands in my pocket. I’d concoct stories about the people around me and the places where I’d like to be. I remember the dangling sensation of waiting, of drifting off into the distance and creating imaginary worlds. Now I try to recreate that feeling by evoking situations. I photograph my friends to rediscover a familiar mood or experience. Moments emerge naturally, magically.

My muses lie in ivy for me. They dance and move freely. They connect to the places where they live, to themselves. We connect with each other. Together we discover the spots hidden around us, a burnt down house, a frozen lake, an empty swimming pool. An element of cinematic storytelling permeates these moments, a mystic filmic experience. I think about the light and the landscape. I think about rooms, corners, trees, skin, and when the images emerge in the squares of my contact sheets, I begin to see. What if these images belonged to someone else? How would I see them then? What would they make me feel?

Images are elusive. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. The important thing is that we are living, we are together, and we are getting it on film. My photography is an act of seduction, even in its exposure to the flaws.

I want my photographs to look stripped bare, to hint at what’s outside the frame. There is always more than what I am showing. My girls are vulnerable and so am I. I am not scared of the dark pieces. I am not afraid to enter the intimate space of these women. They are my sisters, my dolls, my provocative wallflowers, my muses. They inspire me with the realities of womanhood as I explore their details with my camera. The eyebrows, lips, arms. The phallic shape of a throat. The raven hair.

I fall down the rabbit hole into the darkness of that hair. I fall into delicate memories of water, wet hair flipping and cascading in a full moon circle. I hear music under the water, violin strings and waves crashing and bubbles in my ears. I look up at the surface and feel the weightless grace that comes from immersion. These sensations echo in a photograph of a young girl floating in a pool. My memories are evoked by each of these images. They have stuck a cord, hit a note like a tuning fork, sparked a flame, smothered a fire. Through these intimate moments, I become less alone.