Future ghosts, mfa thesis show
All photographs are haunted. Every snapshot, every image, from albumen prints to Polaroids, reflects and preserves the luminosity from when it was taken. To look at a 100-year-old image is to look at 100-year-old light. In that moment, time collapses, and the viewer sees a ghost. When I photograph myself, my mother, my sister--I document future ghosts.
My practice explores the lasting effects of haunted landscapes and what it means to carry a haunting within a body, especially a female body. The anxieties of the last four years in the United States, combined with living through a global pandemic, drew into stark relief the spectres I encounter on a near-daily basis and led me to turn back to the ghosts of my past. Through photography, I seek to recreate my own creeping, unsettling experiences.
Horror is, after all, a genre of relief. It allows the viewer to process ugly emotions through a safe lens, one that is not their life. Through images that destabilize the viewer, banal scenes turned eerie and blurred forms that vibrate in the frame, even the idea of a woman photographing outside, at night--through these images, I invite the viewer to witness my haunts and investigate their own.