Lightfolly Featured in News from Nowhere!

I had the honor to be featured in News from Nowhere this week, a local publication from Laramie to the Wyoming community. It is a biweekly magazine which includes local art and poetry. See the feature here, or read the piece I wrote below.

I am not an authority in womanhood. Except for the fact that I am one. Raised in a macho society within a mainly patriarchal world, I grew up safe and cozy, being taught how to be proper and perfect. How to please others, not myself, because I was supposed to feel pleased by simply fulfilling what was expected of me. I didn’t quite follow suit: I cut my hair short in high school and refused to have a boyfriend or pursue the career that my mother wanted me to pursue. I moved abroad by myself, for graduate school, at an age where half of my childhood friends were mothers. I felt like quite the rebel. I never wanted to be in a position of power; power over myself was enough.

This is how it starts. This is how one grows hollow and purposeless. A woman’s gift is to nurture: a child, a career, a relationship, a dream; whatever endeavor she embarks on. And every day we are put down for owning up to that gift, even when it is what’s expected of us. It took me many years of “rebellion” to understand this, and to develop a visceral rejection for how mundane the idea that nurturing is a weakness has become. Women get in the game and come out on top by losing themselves and being more like men. We mean to strive for equality, but we found ourselves fighting for sameness.

I photograph women. Not because I don’t like men, but because I want to be a part of a river of voices that is awakening the gender that has gone quiet. I invite women into my studio and remind them of the nurturing role they can choose to fulfill. We wear so many hats, and it is when we are nurturers that we wear them best. But we seldom give ourselves permission to just be women, to just nurture without an agenda, naturally and shamelessly. To nurture ourselves. To be present and let our fears, our conquers, our struggles sip through and bloom on the surface. If it ever happens, it goes undocumented. We are too busy, too fat, too skinny, too old, too tired, too grumpy, too preoccupied with being perfect… too quiet to keep a record. And so, we exist mostly behind the camera. Photographing our children, our colleagues, our world. And if we are ever in a photo, we have an uncanny ability to find miniscule, insignificant details of ourselves that we hate and that justify not keeping the snapshot. Delete, delete, delete… So no images of ourselves are left to treasure, like the ones of our grandmothers, in her pearls, which we may be fortunate to find in a shoebox in the attic.

This land of nowhere welcomed me with open arms when I moved here three years ago. It has been forgiving and enriching, and like the mother I left behind it has nurtured me and given me the strength to move out and into and ahead. Its community of business women, mothers, artists, politicians, has empowered me to rediscover my own womanhood, to embrace it, and to want to empower others to do the same. I want every woman I know to give themselves the gift of existing in photos. For themselves and for future generations. I want them to drop the conventions, what’s expected of them, the excuses, the mask they wear every day, and to allow themselves to be nurtured by other women and photographed in a glorious session celebrating their womanhood.

Thanks Wiley Combs for featuring us, and for supporting local art.