These photographs were made in response to the 2020 Glass Mountain fire in Northern California. The fire burned for miles around my aunt’s home. Over the course of two years, I slowly revisited and photographed places that I once knew well. The forests will not grow back the same – a warming climate means the ecosystems are changing, new tree species are emerging, and animals are not returning. With these photographs, I try to bring the viewer into the confusion, loss, and sense of being lost, that one feels as a place unravels. I hope the images reflect the quiet attention needed to orient oneself. The fire was named after the road where it started, and it is also the title of the project; a glass mountain describes the hubris and precarity of our brittle world.
For many years I visited communities where people with a range of mental and physical abilities lived together. All of these communities had gardens— often beautiful and strange combinations of wildflowers and weeds. The gardens looked like how the homes felt. I photographed facing the plants directly, my large format camera balanced in the grass. I wanted to convey the powerful delicacy of the gardens—for them to feel strange and strong yet fragile and exposed.
I overlaid the photographs with different shades of blue sourced from medical supplies. Blue is the color of most things medical: gloves, gowns, and handicapped parking spaces. It is the color of the Virgin Mary, the sky, cold hands, and depression. Blue is infrequent in nature—less than 10 percent of flowers in nature are technically blue. Blue is the hardest color for the human eye to perceive.
Went out upon Circumference—
Beyond the Dip of Bell—
from poem 378
Over the course of one year, I repeatedly photographed Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, focusing on the corner near her desk. For much of Dickinson’s life she chose to remain secluded in her room, rarely leaving or seeing visitors. By photographing this potent corner, I am not trying to replicate what Dickinson might have seen, but rather trying to convey a space that invited a deep concentration. This small corner led to expansive poetry. The room has since been renovated and this wallpaper removed, but the light in the corner remains the same.
I called the project “Circumference,” because it was a concept and word Dickinson relied on frequently in her writings; she used the word to evoke the boundary between the visible and invisible, the known and unknown.
Confessionals are quiet and dark but have traces of voices and light. Past penitents leave scratches and marks on the floor and walls, their words left behind in the darkness. Confessionals hold the memory of past presences – they are haunted by layers of invisible secrets.
I photographed these spaces with only available light and a large format camera. During the long exposures, the camera would stand where the penitent would kneel, inside the confessional, waiting up to 40 minutes. The film absorbed the darkness and also maybe some of the secrets left behind.
For 10 years I photographed confessionals around the United States. I was raised Catholic, but as a queer woman, my relationship to the church is complex. I represent the confessionals as spaces of contradiction and ambiguity — the work is an attempt to hold paradox.