Sanctuary

Note: Update on "Love and Loss in a time of Climate Anxiety" is suspended pending the end of the pandemic and has been replaced by Twelve Prints: Photographs from Home.

Sanctuary, (c) 1989
The Ituri Rain Forest, Congo Basin, Zaire

Love and Loss in a time of Climate Anxiety, is a project I have spent my whole life preparing to make. I have grown up listening to native stories about the natural world and looking at art, both indigenous and contemporary. This has allowed me to create a type of visual fusion that integrates the effusive attachments and profound understanding of nature traditional peoples have, and combine them with my unique photographic techniques of story telling. I use the visual language of fine art photography to express the stories of nature through my subjects own experiences. 

"Sanctuary," is a photograph of a young Efe woman admiring her forest in the early morning. She is warming herself in the sun streaking through the dense canopy of tree. Never have I met a people so in love with their forest and so willing to allow me to share that love with the world through a series of photographs. Throughout my career as an artist, I have been photographing, the faces of nature my whole life as a way to underscore our innate interconnectedness to our world and environment. Native peoples, particularly women have educated me about this connection over the decades.

As we move into an era now referred to as the anthropocene epoch, we are faced with unprecedented climate and environmental uncertainty. Will our forests survive or burn? Will the oceans become so warm and so acidic that all life on earth is threatened? Can we still find comfort in nature in the face of escalating climate unpredictability and therefore become consumed by greater and deeper climate anxiety?

These are questions that inspire the new project, "Faces of Nature." I will photograph our entanglement and estrangement with nature in a way that illustrates our attachments as well as our pain, as we confront a world we are at once ruining but also trying to save.

I look forward to sharing my work here with you.

Elisabeth Sunday

Faces of Nature project director