I made these photographs inside my home and in the 500-square-foot terrain that makes up my backyard. I work within these narrowly defined spaces because I’m disabled (I have osteogenesis imperfecta and osteoporosis) and travel is hard for me.
In dialogue with asset-focused, social model interpretations of disability (rather than deficit-centric, medicalized constructions of human difference) I ask: What happens when I honor and frame the needs of my body as muse and catalyst, utilize those needs as a starting point, and produce work from that place?
Although I’m disabled, I’m often read as abled by the people with whom I interact each day. As I make these photographs I think also about my experience of living in a non-visibly disabled body. While I use the camera tool to examine and record the humble wonders and curiosities around me, I also, at times, use its technical capacities to blur or wipe out information and detail in the things I photograph. I do this to bring attention to the space between the visible and the invisible and to create images that (like me) exist in a space between the expected and unexpected, the acceptable and the wonky.
While this project becomes a visual document of my attempts to make the photographs I want in dialogue with the capacities of my body, I hope it also underscores the enormous amount of potential and beauty that lies within a single, narrowly-defined, seemingly unremarkable space. The mundane backyard and run-of-the-mill home, like the marginalized space of the disabled body, is, depending on one’s perspective, replete with potential, capacity, and value.
Wounds as power, the working title for this project, comes from the Adrienne Rich poem Power.
In dialogue with asset-focused, social model interpretations of disability (rather than deficit-centric, medicalized constructions of human difference) I ask: What happens when I honor and frame the needs of my body as muse and catalyst, utilize those needs as a starting point, and produce work from that place?
Although I’m disabled, I’m often read as abled by the people with whom I interact each day. As I make these photographs I think also about my experience of living in a non-visibly disabled body. While I use the camera tool to examine and record the humble wonders and curiosities around me, I also, at times, use its technical capacities to blur or wipe out information and detail in the things I photograph. I do this to bring attention to the space between the visible and the invisible and to create images that (like me) exist in a space between the expected and unexpected, the acceptable and the wonky.
While this project becomes a visual document of my attempts to make the photographs I want in dialogue with the capacities of my body, I hope it also underscores the enormous amount of potential and beauty that lies within a single, narrowly-defined, seemingly unremarkable space. The mundane backyard and run-of-the-mill home, like the marginalized space of the disabled body, is, depending on one’s perspective, replete with potential, capacity, and value.
Wounds as power, the working title for this project, comes from the Adrienne Rich poem Power.