Dog years
To the dogs
The time is summer, the place is home – sometimes the home where I grew up and other times a home-for-now. The feeling is the same, repeated and reinterpreted, sometimes taking different forms but always recognizable. A lot has changed in these places, a lot has changed in me. It’s not by accident that many of these photographs contain water in some form, it’s something I have gravitated towards my whole life, something I identify with. In a constant state of change, a force of transformation; just as water can feed, it can destroy. Before I could swim, I tasted the icy river water as it filled my lungs. That next summer, I learned how to hold my breath.
In the words of Jenna Wortham, “Each time I allowed myself to be enveloped, something is remembered for me: a place, a feeling, a fluency. I can’t always name it, but it’s too powerful to deny. It’s almost as if the parts of myself that have gone missing are recollected in water. I retrieve them, accreting myself back to myself.”