Aftershock

Following the upset of the 2016 presidential election, I felt compelled to document our shared grief. Walking around in a haze the day after the election, watching the haunted faces, seeing the numb spread like a blanket across my city, holding loved ones while they sobbed. On November 8, so many of us had begun as a tangle of nerves, anxious and excited; as the day progressed into evening we became a country in shock, a nation in mourning. These images are poignant intimate self-portraits of those first hours and days of shock, grief, despair, rage, and disbelief following the election. 

I asked folks to share with me their own first images of themselves in the immediate aftermath. The first hours and days when we hadn’t yet seen what was to come, but we knew it was going to come fast and hard. Those crashing moments as we watched the future we had imagined for ourselves and for each other crumble.

It was important to me that this witnessing be captured in the privacy and intimacy of turning the camera on oneself, the ownership of the self, the body, that same ownership that was newly more deeply in peril. I wanted to capture the watershed moment, the specific and individual witnessing of what I knew in my bones was a dark and perilous turn for us all.

The work spans the gap between the intimate and political, reminding us that these moments are not abstract and distant, but rather visceral, personal, and deeply embedded in the fabric of our collective experience, that politics affects our nerve, our bone, our very being.

*Special thanks to all who submitted images and shared their vulnerable and intimate moments with me.