Still Small Voice

(in progress)

Mormons are taught to listen for signs of the holy spirit in a still small voice that fills your chest with a feeling of love and connection. They tell you it is what gives you proof that their's is the one true church, and they are encouraged and even pressured to bare their testimony of that truth before the whole congregation. It was something I could never do.

That the stirring in my chest was there—it was never felt in prayer or in church or in receiving any blessed sacrament. It was something I felt walking through the desert and mountains near my home in Joshua Tree. It was something my father felt was his failure, and kept him from ascending to the highest celestial realms.

In early 2020, I made a short trip to Death Valley, just a week after my father's death, and the first trip by myself since the birth of my son in 2018. The five days of photographing and back-country camping allowed for the solitude and meditative time I needed to grieve, reflect on our relationship, and make work that came from a raw emotional place. It also allowed me to explore ideas of birth, death, and creation myths and how those ideas manifest themselves in my photographs.

I gravitated toward an elongated frame using wide-angle lenses, and the abstracted forms of the canyon walls created a sense of not knowing where you are in space. The rock walls are imposing and seemingly chaotic, but by getting lost in the pictures you begin to see what I think of as the edge between chaos and cosmos—a passage that leads to some light at the center. I see that light as both in us and what we are on a lifelong journey to reach. That chaos is perfect, and the goal is to integrate yourself with that perfection.

I made a second short trip to Death Valley in January 2022 to continue working on the nascent project, and found myself hiking back through the canyons where I was photographing well after dark. Without the aid of artificial light and only the moonlight to guide me, my pace slowed, and it created a sense of hyper-awareness and mental space that led me to think about photographing at night as a way to embrace and confront the unknown..