Early Winter Color photography from medium format color film scans on cotton rag paper 24” x 30” each of twenty-four 2019
In 2002 scientists identified the emerald ash borer (EAB) as the cause of the decimation of the North American Fraxinus, commonly known as the ash tree. EAB is an insect that feeds on ash leaves and then lays its eggs in the crevices of the bark. The tree dies as the larvae mature and chew into the phloem, destroying the ability of the ash to transport nutrients from its canopy to the roots, and water from the roots to its canopy.
In 2013 my mom discovered that she had been living with a rare auto-immune disorder that caused her liver to harden— slowly preventing it from doing its important jobs of regulating sugars, eliminating toxins, and converting nutrients into usable substances for her body. Over the next six years she lost over 100 pounds as her body succumbed to malnutrition. Her decline hastened over the summer of 2018 when her back was fractured in a car accident days after learning her husband of fifty years had stage-four pancreatic cancer.
My dad died in July, my mom in October, 2018.
Increasingly intense care-taking became the new norm for myself and my siblings, followed by funeral arrangements, legal matters, sorting a home and a lifetime of belongings, and finally selling an empty house. Daily trips from my house to theirs became weekly, then monthly drives. Each journey took me past this row of over 150 ash trees—long dead, yet upright; no longer living, but still observable. I am comforted by their presence, by this visual record of death existing so elegantly among life. Is it really possible to die before our time, or is it just that we sometimes die before the living are ready to let us go?
These images were made during the first snowfall of winter, 2018-19.