Description
“The haunting, expressive photographs in this publication can be perceived as evocations of a long and fruitful collaboration between two people whose lives have intertwined across many decades. Scott and Grace are parents, they share a profound commitment to their spiritual pursuits, they are each other’s best friends. But above and beyond persevering together through the vicissitudes of life, they have, later in their relationship, found a way of making photographs that transcend the tradition of active man with camera and passive wife as sitter. Grace and Scott explore imagination, sense of play, and the possible meanings of the natural world. In the work, they fashion an escape from the bonds of this dimension with its cultural norms and strictures on our behaviors, especially those of women.
In the photographs they devise, Grace literally scales the walls that confine her to her quotidian milieu. On the other side she is delivered into a fairytale forest where logic and responsibility evaporate. In her wanderings, which are always depicted as solitary, she discovers signs and symbols generated by the forest in a reimagining of nature and the place of a modern human in it. Inside the house, Grace’s presence is often implied: a hat, a jacket, a shadow, the fluff of dandelions. Outside, she is a Nordic goddess preparing for battle, a sylph resting beneath a tree, a deity of wildness. Women of a certain age become, sociologically speaking, invisible and are not much seen in art. Yet, for the camera, for Scott, for her own ends and ours, Grace operates freely, clearly seen and empowered in these images. She occupies her own unique and compelling alternate universe where she and Scott create narratives the viewer is impelled to interpret.
One should not think that Scott’s role is only that of scribe or recorder of events; this is a mutual endeavor, one carefully planned and structured but also one that allows for response to what is found in the landscape, for spontaneous creativity. Scott works primarily with view cameras so the process is slow. There is time for conversation, for planning, for repeated takes. There is also time for Scott and Grace to develop this magical allegory together, an allegory in which the symbols may not be directly legible but one that questions what is knowable in nature, in marriage, between individuals, in one’s own mind. Their combined inventiveness allows us — the viewers of this beautiful, dreamlike body of work — to climb out of our own familiar spheres and, for a moment or two or ten, partake of the liberty in theirs.”
Laura McPhee
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