I've spent a chunk of time working on my fine art site the last couple weeks. Not that it's finished yet, by far, but I'm pretty stoked to have gotten a longterm project called 'The Sweet House' presented. It's a multi-media presentation with a slideshow and an accompanying pdf of a short story I wrote with the photographs in mind, and I'd love to present it sometime publicly--reading the story, showing the slides. I have to give thanks to Daphne Bramham who writes about the polygamist community of Bountiful for the Vancouver Sun; without her articles, I doubt this project would have coalesced. The images were, after all, originally unconnected to this subject matter, and were, in a real sense accidental. I was shooting in a ramshackle old house in New Brunswick, Canada, a house a thousand other photographers have shot in as part of Freeman Patterson and André Gallant's spring workshops. The walls were coming apart at the seams; there was daylight showing through the roof; there was debris everywhere; there were plants growing inside through the windows.
I wanted to photograph a person. I had spent nearly a week shooting my way through landscapes and old cars and running streams, and I longed more than anything to set my lenses on something or someone with a heartbeat. And secondly I craved a ghostly influence in that house of forgotten stories. A sort of half-seen presence flitting from room to room and shot with tons of motion blur so her edges vanished and melded with the background.
Kayla, wearing her auntie's old wedding gown, was an astonishing model; if she lived nearby, I would ask her to pose again and again. She has a sternness of purpose in the photographs that spoke to the issues that would, by mid-summer, be consuming me as I wrote the accompanying piece of short fiction.
In the end, the house represented the ruination of a young girl's childhood.
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