This Place Could Be Beautiful

“Mom, where’s my permission slip?” “When can we play Ipad?” “I want more cheese!” “I need my grey shorts today.” I stand staring at the counter in a daze, wondering if I have any more bread or ham for school lunches. My 4 -year-old breaks my trance as he tugs on my arm saying, “Momma! Momma!” I gaze down at his innocent eyes. “I love you,” he gleams.

I put on a smile and said “thank you.” But deep down I wrestle with feelings of inadequacy. I’ll never measure up to the idealized mom who effortlessly remembers forms, bakes for bake sales, or orchestrates Pinterest-perfect birthday parties. Shame grips me, leaving me feeling stuck but I continue my motherly duties until I can find a moment to breathe.

When the moment comes, I retreat to my garden, walking among the dahlias in quiet admiration. The distant hum of my neighbor’s mower drowns out the voice of doubt. Pausing to pull weeds, I note their persistence to overrun the garden. With my clippers, I carefully trim away spent flowers, clearing the way for new growth.

I live in two worlds, motherhood and my garden. Most of the time, I am mothering through the messy, chaotic, and beautiful moments. Gratitude is rare, boredom common, and every decision feels crucial. I seek solace in the garden, a place I can control. The methods and tools provide structure. I rediscover a sense of purpose and belonging. Gardening becomes not just a chore but a meditation on growth and renewal, a tangible reflection of my journey through motherhood’s unpredictable landscape.

 No Trespassing

The mountains of West Virginia are wildly beautiful with remote unincorporated towns that hold not only ethereal nature and private people, but also family secrets, strange occurrences, ghosts, unsolved mysteries and local superstitions. It is also where my family is from.

As a child in the ’70’s and ’80’s, we lived in DC but visited my grandparents in West Virginia often, sometimes staying the entire summer. My siblings and I explored the woods and followed creek streams and railroad tracks looking for ghosts and the supernatural. I was an inquisitive kid who also enjoyed eavesdropping on visitors that sat around my grandmother’s
kitchen table gossiping, until I was noticed and chased away. I heard talk about a farm witch, a ghost hunter, and a mechanic my mother might have been cheating on my father with. I persuaded my siblings to climb over fences with No Trespassing signs to spy on the people being gossiped about. It was a childhood of mischief and exploration, secrets and intrigue.

After my grandparents passed away when I was fifteen, I didn’t visit anymore. City life in California lured me away and it was there I learned some people make fun of West Virginia. As an awkward, shy teen, I felt embarrassed and didn’t want to be called a hick.

Decades passed until fate mandated my return to West Virginia. The moment I stepped out of the airplane I felt a nostalgia bomb of comforting familiarity. It looked the same, wildly rural, but the people I was fascinated with were gone. Their homes were still there, although many sat abandoned and empty. I became obsessed with the old structures, the land, the people that once lived there. Again, I ignored No Trespassing signs and searched for clues. I found my own ghosts and the memories that were evoked about this place, the people and about me.

“No Trespassing” is a non linear portrait of my childhood and birthplace. Using diptychs, pinhole photography, collages and surrogates, I explore how memory and land are intertwined and triggering, and the manner in which things are remembered, sometimes as faint fragments, sometimes vivid and clear. I uncover that I have powerful bonds to the roots of my origin despite my absence. I embrace my identity with intrigue for the past and the now. As this body of work progressed, it evolved in to a love letter to West Virginia and my heritage.

 anemoia /′a-nə-mȯi-ə/ noun. Nostalgia for a time or place one has never known*

Modern life has stirred an interest in looking back upon imagined better days. While nostalgia can be real, it can also be influenced (or created) by stories about the past. Whatever the source, this feeling is often entwined with a sense of place.

On daily walks with a moody infrared camera, I searched for “place” in historic homes, city streets, museums, farmyards, old neighborhoods, decaying mill sites, and the woods. I found solace in the architecture of the past, comfort in the sacredness of daily life, and melancholy in the passage of time.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.”  − T.S. Eliot from “Little Gidding”

*John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

 A Quiet So Loud

I grew up in a family that did not talk about our feelings.  I believed the strong emotions I felt and the buzz in my head were normal. I believed that everyone experienced this. Eventually it became clear that I was different.

The act of staying present, the fear of being seen and the constant noise in my head leave me exhausted. To quiet my thoughts I look for the light hidden, in the mundane. I search for  clarity in the familiar. I seek out beauty in the broken, order in the chaos.

I hope that through this series of images others who feel invisible, or hide behind a smile will see that they are not alone.  I hope they see that broken can be beautiful and that there is always light, you just have to know where to look.  For those who have never experienced darkness like this, a quiet so loud you can’t sleep, an exhaustion so profound you wish you would disappear, I want you to see that it takes great strength to balance the darkness and the light.

CIRCLING

A loop encircles the farm where I grew up. I know it so well. I can close my eyes and picture the twists and turns of the road, the light sifting through the trees, the reflections in the river. When I can’t sleep, I imagine leaving home and setting out to walk the loop. If I move slowly, I rarely get past the first mile before I drift off.  

After my mother died, I began to make pictures of my childhood landscape. This terrain is inextricably interwoven into who I am today and how I see the world. My own genetic material comes as much from the landscape as it does from my family. The trees are the grandparents I never had. For me, being in this landscape feels a bit like being in a place of worship. The meditative quiet allows my mind to empty out and reorder thoughts in a way that seems manageable and clear.  

Through photographing this familiar landscape, as well as my mother’s objects, I am beginning the process of grieving her loss and coming to grips with my own mortality. These images channel my thoughts and feelings as I work through the brew of emotion that surrounds this phase of life. The passage of time can be such a dizzying blur and it has all caught up with me rather abruptly. As I travel these familiar roads, I feel as though I am on something of an archeological dig, unearthing and exploring a time capsule of lost memories and regret. I am trying to understand who and where I have been all these years, and most importantly, the promise of what comes next.

About

Margaret Lampert is a photographer based in Cambridge Massachusetts. Growing up on a dairy farm north of Boston with two very visual parents, she was influenced by art and the natural world in equal measure. Margaret studied Art History & English at the University of New Hampshire and just after graduating college she began working in the department of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here, while assisting the acting curator of the photography collection, Margaret fell in love with the medium and, with little technical knowledge but a head full of pictures she set out to become a photographer. Through apprenticeships and workshops she honed her skills and has been making pictures ever since. With her background in fiction writing and art history, and a deep curiosity in human nature, Margaret seeks to create visually and emotionally compelling narratives through portraiture and landscape. 

Lyn Swett Miller

Still, In Motion

In May 2022, we buried my mother on a bed of compost she and I created together. Surrounded by the mycorrhizae she loved, my mother was now in the care of others and I was free from my 56 year responsibility to make her happy. Since birth, my job had been to bring joy and distraction after my brother Paul, whom I never knew, died of ‘crib death.’ Over the decades, this expectation wore me down. 

After my mother died, I kept her spirit, and the spirits of other women in my life at arms length, creating still lives with their belongings. Over time those belongings beckoned. Still, In Motion is my first foray into self-portraiture. Playing dress-up with vintage clothes belonging to women I’ve loved and lost and working with props, like childhood photographs, an old cigarette and a vintage frame, I danced to the other side of grief, emerging in a grove of trees I created during my mother’s final year. 

These ritualistic ‘performances’ were a wondrous three-way conversation with my camera, the objects at hand and my grief. Along the way, I processed Mummy and me. She loved to walk alone in the woods, something that made me afraid; I loved to dance, something that made her self-conscious. Mummy read about ‘gutsy gals;’ I wanted to be one. Through it all, we are still, in motion. She’s becoming one with the soil; I’m becoming me.

About

Lyn Swett Miller is a micro-climate photographer happiest mucking around with the detritus of her life. While investigating compost, landfills and other aspects of our material world, she creates visual meditations on the power of regeneration, transformation and renewal.

Miller lives in Hanover, NH where she has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out what it takes for a suburban family of four to live sustainably. She is a founding member of the Sustainable Hanover Committee and has found a voice for her activism through photography. Over time, compost became her muse and metaphor.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Miller is an art history graduate from Harvard College with an MBA and a Masters in Teaching. Miller’s first solo show, “Compost Compositions,” was in 2019. Since then, her work has been in numerous juried exhibitions throughout the United States. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Compost: Muse & Metaphor,” was at WinCam at The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts (Fall 2022).

Gordon Saperia

Threshold of a Dream

Drifting towards sleep, I see dimly lit, vaguely familiar landscapes that continuously transform. These visions are the inspiration for the places I create in my photographic montages, each a fusion of elements from photographs taken around the world. Combining vistas and fields, a palette of exaggerated colors, and surprising juxtapositions, these places express a tension between the intimate and the mysterious. Like my visualizations, they are both odd and oddly familiar. In Threshold of a Dream, I invite you to explore these new worlds with me. 

About

Gordon Saperia is a Boston based lens artist whose primary focus is the creation of dream-like composite images of the natural world. These colorful fantasies are assembled from photographs of previously visited, worldwide landscapes and are infused with his memory of how he felt being there. 

Saperia’s photographs have been included in juried and invited exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, the A Smith Gallery, and the Concord Art Association, as well as many other venues. Additionally, his work has been published in the Photographic Society of America (PSA) Journal, and he was the project manager for The Focused Eye – Our Unique Views, a unique outdoor banner installation in Boston’s Seaport District during the summer of 2021. 

While mostly self-taught, Gordon has studied photography with established educators including Marc Muench, Keith Carter, Susan Burnstine, Betty Wiley, Emily Belz, and most recently Valda Bailey. In his former life, he had a long and satisfying career in medicine, first as an interventional cardiologist and subsequently as an editor of online medical content for healthcare professionals. 

He is represented by Copley Society for Art, Boston, MA.

Cassandra Goldwater

Constructed Memory

Memory is unreliable. As eyewitnesses of our own pasts, we create a narrative that, while grounded by evidence as simple as a bird’s nest or a worn suitcase, must be rounded out by fiction–a crafted memory that reflects a single voice, a single point of view.

In Constructed Memory, a series of still lifes and landscapes, I craft a personal narrative that acknowledges the pain of the sudden loss of a father and being raised by a thirty-seven-year-old widow with four children under twelve and no real family supports. Shaped in part by nostalgia, and a longing for home and identity, I use bits of collections – family heirlooms and found objects– to orchestrate the fiction that is memory.

About

Cassandra Goldwater uses photography to wrestle with current events and histories both personal and political. While many of her images combine found objects, she is also drawn to the interplay of the natural environment with her imagination. 

Her photographs have been shown in many group exhibitions including those at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Davis Orton Gallery, the SE Center for Photography, the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Art, and on the Curated Fridge. 

Goldwater has studied photography at the DeCordova Museum, the New England School of Photography, New Hampshire Institute of Art, and the Griffin Museum of Photography.  Additionally, she has taken workshops with Cig Harvey at the Santa Fe Workshops and with Sean Kernan at the North Country Workshops. 

Goldwater teaches composition at UMass Lowell and her commentary on the photographic work of Jennette Williams and Jellen van Meene appeared in the Women’s Review of Books. A lifelong New Englander, she currently resides in the small city of Lowell, Massachusetts where it is rumored a renaissance is in the making.

Diane Bennett

Training Grounds

As a street photographer, I frequently observe children at play. Sometimes children make the rules; sometimes adults direct the experience. Either way, children’s play is usually serious work, rehearsal for future roles and expectations as they explore the world. 

In this project, Training Grounds, I use children’s play as a mirror to examine broader trends in American culture. Though often unobserved, what our children experience through play is likely to shape their assumptions and aspirations – and reveal the undercurrents of our own values.

About

With or without a camera, Diane Bennett asks herself: Where is the emotion in these surroundings? This long-standing focus informs her B&W photography, merging street-level reality, broader myth and personal resonance in the moment of capture. None of her images are staged or materially manipulated, following the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) guidelines. She searches the real, looking for the really real.  

Bennett’s series, Elastic Sidewalk, has had solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography and Concord MA Library Art Gallery. Her images have been included in many juried shows: the LA Center of Photography, Fitchburg Art Museum, Whistler House Museum of Art, Photographic Resource Center Boston, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, SE Center for Photography and The Curated Fridge.

Bennett attributes her early visual education to living and working in New York City, with its diversity, art institutions and storied history of street photography. Coursework at the Griffin Museum of Photography, New England School of Photography and Doton Saguy’s Street Photography Masterclass has enriched her practice, as has mentorship with artist and curator, Emily Belz. Bennett has a M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, NYC, and academic credentials and professional experience in social services and software engineering. She resides in the greater Boston area.

Diana Cheren Nygren

Mother Earth 

Nevertheless she persisted.

A city girl and skeptic to my core, I feel an overwhelming sense of awe in the face of a desert spread before me or the expanse of the ocean. Within these magnificent landscapes, humanity seems small and insignificant. Geologic eras are etched into layers of rock and our time on earth seems short in contrast. So far there have been thirty-seven epochs in the history of this planet. Humans have been on Earth for less than two of these, though our impact on the shape of the planet has been tremendously outsized. What will the next epoch look like? 

I have mounted scenes of human habitation behind acrylic, plastic walls that we imagine can safely separate the things we do from having an impact on the natural world. I have then affixed these scenes onto and within sweeping landscapes. I am presenting this work without glass. The constructed world behind the acrylic is literally protected, while the landscapes remain exposed and vulnerable. A continuity of line and color between these two parts of the work hints at their interconnectedness. I use the desert southwest of the United States as a stand-in for what the majority of the land on our planet might look like as it continues to be shaped by rising temperatures, drought, and fires. Ultimately, I present these multi-layered images in hand-painted wooden frames, alluding to the next chapter in the planet’s history. As the image pushes beyond its edges, the story continues to evolve. 

In spite of human activity, the Earth continues to transform and reinvent itself. The Earth is not coming to an end. Its inhabitants cannot escape its permanence, and the power it has to shape their existence. The question remains, as nature reinvents itself, can we adapt with it? Will we be part of that next chapter?

About

Diana Cheren Nygren is a photography based artist. Her work explores the relationship of people to the physical environment, and landscape as a setting for human activity. Diana obtained a B.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University and a M.A. in Art History from UC Berkeley. Her training as an art historian focussed on modern art, and the relationship of artistic production to its socio-political context. Her work as a photographer is the culmination of a life-long investment in the power of art and visual culture to shape and influence social change, addressing serious questions through a blend of documentary practice, invention, and humor. Her work has exhibited around the globe and has won numerous awards including TIFA Discovery of the Year, PX3 Best New Talent, and LICC Best in Shoot.