Vanessa R Thompson’s latest photography series, “The Spoils,” explores foods that are associated with comfort and nourishment gone past their edible point. She delves into the deep, organic energy of the natural world: textures, smells, deaths. What comes from the earth comes back to the earth. In the end, we become what we consume.

Her inspiration for this series comes from her introduction to the worker right movement of late 1990s combined with a complicated personal relationship with food. This leads her to explore the rot within the food production life cycle: exploitative labor practices, unsafe working conditions in food production facilities, and inhumane conditions in farm and field.

If we look away from the rot and only focus on what is presented on our plate for consumption, we look away from the process that brings each plate of food to the table, and how that consumes us.

Vanessa R Thompson’s work is an invitation to sit for a while with the spoiled results of our food production system.

Breathwork is a series of landscapes offering refuge from the turmoil and chaos of life. Creating space for calmness inspires self-care, helping me to reclaim my mind from worry and despair.

Moving through my life has left me feeling battered and bruised. In my quest for peace, I have discovered my creative practice can offer deep healing. Clearing the cutter in my mind through meditation grounds me in the alchemy of quietude, where the messages and guidance lay waiting.

Opening the channel of creative flow, constructed urban landscapes spin forward out of the shadows in surprisingly brilliant colors of jubilation. Orbs of light invite me to follow life’s natural rhythm, bringing me back into balance.

I invite you to get more comfortable..soften the edges of your eyes..breathe slowly through the nose…allow your jaw to be slightly open…drop your shoulders…feel the bottom ribs flare out on the in breath, and contract on the out-breath…and now focus on the area of your heart, as you breathe slowly.

“Finding Home”

When you travel to another country out of duress and try to make it your home, what stresses and anxieties might run through your mind? Language, customs, a job, transportation, healthcare? My photo essay began with a local news story about hundreds of Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban and arriving in Massachusetts in August 2021. The story, “Finding Home,” follows a young Afghan father and his young family’s arrival into a local community, learning a new language, interviewing, and finding a job, and moving into a home they can call their own.

Through all types of traditional and social media, we are inundated with images of immigration and human migration issues, refugees, resettlement, the border walls, and the political infighting and need for power that separates people from each other. With my photographs, I hope to open the eyes to our local community on how much more we have in common than our differences. The passion for this project stems from my desire to dig a bit deeper into a new family in our neighborhood that values the same as we do in the United States – family, work, safety, and a stable future.

Scot Langdon
June 14, 2022

. . . the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images . . . (Plato Book VII)

In the Shadows is a photographic investigation into unexamined perceptual distortions. With a
nod to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” are we also unwitting prisoners struggling to distinguish
between appearances and reality?

Initially a respectful exploration of the beauty of the female form, In the Shadows evolved into a
response to the diminution of female autonomy. With increasing societal divisiveness, how do
we tune out the rhetoric and tune into our humanity? I approached this series as an inquiry into
how we perceive, as I believe it underlies so much discord.

In the Shadows asks us to ponder the many internal and external influences in our complex
world, inviting us to consider the essence of what we see. Even a portion of something familiar
to our senses invites us to complete the whole, with a strong bias to keeping reality in the
shadows. Will we allow unexamined ideologies, dogma and belief systems, not to mention
social media, to serve as shadows unconsciously influencing our perceptions, and thus our
thoughts and actions? Or will we take back our power and face the dissonance from challenging
the forces of these shadows?

 

My parents, older sister and I immigrated to the US when I was an infant. Growing up far away from any extended family, I missed what I imagined to be the grounding force of aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents around me. My parents rarely spoke of their lives in Belgium in the 1940s – 1960s.

I showed my mother a family photo from her childhood, and asked her, “What do you see?” She began to tell me an intergenerational story of feuds over money, alcoholism, infidelity, child abandonment, jealousy, and domestic abuse. This ongoing multimedia series is sparked by fragments of family history. The longer I work on it, the more magical realism seems to creep in.

Short Stories

Through unposed photographs of everyday dramas, my series “Short Stories” brings out the fleeting scenes in life that otherwise pass us by. I use analog processes in my work to help me slow down, look at the world around me, and make more considered choices. Isolating these spontaneous episodes in solitary images takes them out of time and place, which frees us to fully digest their subtle details and infuse each moment with new significance and symbolism.

I am interested in balanced, structured compositions, as in the work of street and documentary photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Saul Leiter, and James Ravilious. I made the photographs in “Short Stories” on 35mm black-and-white film (primarily Ilford HP5 Plus) using a motley collection of old SLR and rangefinder cameras, and printed them in the darkroom on Ilford fiber paper. These cinematic, ambiguous impressions encourage us to look long and deeply to discover layers of story, character, and meaning.

Eighty-Sixed explores images of a former state hospital, an old school barber shop and a number of private residences in various stages of decay at night. These and other forgotten places represent a loss of identity, family and time. I’ve always been curious by how these properties came to be viewed as an eyesore, cast off by society. If you take the time to stop and view the buildings you see an image from a bygone era.

Photographing at night highlights the quietness and lack of humanity in the buildings. By using an artificial light source to light paint my subjects I am creating the light which transforms the scene revealing the colors and details that lurk in the shadows. The colorful textures reflect the depth and history of each place. I’ve included a background history of each property. 

– Sean K. Sullivan 2022