Proposal Submitted!

Well, it's taken me more than a year, but I have finally gotten my shit together (thanks to the lovely Eliza and her expert writing help!). Yes, I have submitted a proposal to have a show and I am feeling so DAMN good about it. Maybe now my wish to have a showing of our photos, and the new photos I have been developing (from the hospital photos) will come true before or very near Birdie's 2nd birthday. It certainly would be amazing and so important to my family. I am also putting together a list of other galleries and some museums to submit to. My goal is to get this proposal out to as many places as I can in the next few weeks. If your interested, here is the final draft!


I believe that photography plays an important role in capturing pivotal moments in one's life and in others’ lives. For many, the first photographs of their newborn will become the most joyful and treasured of family photographs.


For some, those first moments, those most happy and life-changing moments will never exist. Instead the first impression of their newborn child will be filled with silence and tears. Neonatal loss, or the death either before or during the birth of a newborn, is specific to my own personal history, and in the work that I am proposing to show I document the stillbirth of my first child. Upon waking from an emergency surgery to find that we had lost our daughter my world and existence were crushed beyond what words can describe, distilled into imagery and impression alone. Within my shock I somehow requested that my parents bring me my camera. While of course I was devastated by my daughter's unexpected death, I was compelled to photograph my child, my husband, and myself. I didn’t give it a second thought. To me it felt like the right thing to do, to create and document the only memories we could ever have of our brief time as a family, and later on these photographs provided the raw material for some new images I went on to create. In September 2007 I began photographing myself, and my husband at a time when the intensity of our grief was beginning to transform. I sandwiched the images together creating portraits that reveal a struggle of conflicting emotions that are just beneath the surface, and through the same process combined images of my husband and myself with our daughter, literally making my own memories of our emotions at the time.


These photographs, although obviously personal and intense, hold so much importance for so many, because "each year in the United States, out of an estimated 4.4 million confirmed pregnancies, there are more than half a million miscarriages, twenty-nine thousand stillbirths and thirty nine thousand infant deaths under 1 year of age." This leaves an estimated 568,000 families forever changed by this terrible experience each year, but somehow that is something our society seems to overlook as a whole. Post-mortem photography, once the norm, has now fallen out of fashion. I believe that there is still a place for this, depending on each individual family's feelings on the matter, especially when you are talking about the death of a newborn, whose family won't have any other pictures by which to remember a child.


Family Portrait is an exploration of the invisibility and denial of grief in American society. Why do we hide from grief, from fully feeling and processing our own most painful memories, and shy away from the grief of others? I ask this question specifically when the death we hide from is that of a neonate, the most unimaginable and tragic but paradoxically also the most unacknowledged of losses.


Through these photographs I seek to make a meaningful contribution to the much-needed discourse in the artistic community about death in today's society, as well as raising the awareness for the many "invisible" deaths that occur every year in this country and around the world. Showing these photographs at A.P.E. has great relevance to the community, as through our experience my husband and I have met many local families who have been touched by the death of a newborn. The short lives of the children of families touched by a loss like ours need not remain invisible, and our very real and overwhelming grief deserves recognition; it is my hope that this exhibit will not only move and speak to families like mine, but make people whose lives have not been touched by such a loss have more compassion for friends and family of theirs whose lives may be.


In addition to getting this proposal out into the hands of gallery directors, I have also found re-newed inspiration for continuing this lifelong photographic project. A while ago, I planned to photograph every single object we have that Birdie's flesh made contact with (the monkey onesie we dressed her in, her little stuffed froggy, the hat and mitts I knit for her etc.), and ALL of the objects that we have acquired since she passed (and that's A LOT!). For a short time, my desire to actually go through with the project faded, but I have been re-inspired, and I hope in the next few weeks with Matt's help to get this project off the ground. I will keep you posted about it, as I will probably take some preliminary/test shots with my digital camera before actually loading my medium format and burning through a lot of film (something I am totally excited for, I love the look of medium format photographs, so beautiful and elegant).

Birdie, this is all for you my love. You are my true inspiration, I want to make something beautiful for you and about you everyday, always....forever!