The Fire Has Been Lit, and I Am Off And Running!

Here is a 2nd Draft, thank you so much Eliza & Sara for your expert writing help! With your gracious assistance this proposal is shaping up to be something so much stronger than I could have written on my own. I am still open to critiques, so keep em' coming!



I believe in the important role photography plays in capturing pivotal moments in one's life and in other's 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. Following the death of my daughter I 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, with myself and my husband, didn’t give it a second thought. To me it felt like the right thing to do, to create the only memories we could of our brief time as a family.


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." Leaving an estimated 568,000 thousand families devastated by this terrible experience each year, something that our society seems to overlook as a whole. Post-mortem photography, once the norm, has now fallen out of fashion, and I believe that there is still a place for this, depending on each individual family's feelings on the matter, but especially when you are talking about the death of a newborn, whose family don't have any other pictures by which to remember their beloved 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 unacceptable and unacknowledged of deaths.


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.



p.s. Eliza & Sara, would you be interested in helping me with my artist statement (already written, needs some work) and Bio for the book I am applying to have published?