A series of photographs exploring memory, intimacy & distance
“Perhaps you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, of a fatal decision.. the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.
They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some sense you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possess you.” Rebecca Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The photographs in Year of the Fallen Oak were made in the Cumberland Plateau during a time of grief and transition in our family life: the unexpected death of my father-in-law Doug, the birth of my husband’s first grandchildren, and our move to Arkansas. The making of this work has been a process of saying goodbye to what was, a series of unresolved gestures echoing through time. As a photographer, time is always my subject; intimacy, loss and vulnerability are topics explored collectively as I ask new family members to photograph with me in a spirit of reciprocity and exchange, collaborating in a shared exploration of place and memory.
