Photobook Release: The Fragile Blade

Below the city of Rome, in the Crypt of the Capuchin Order, patterns of flowers on the walls are composed of human bones. Separated out by part and organized, there hang rows of femurs, a swirled motif of mandibles, ornamentally arranged scapulae. A long hallway connects the crypt’s many chambers, each decorated with the skeletal remains of hundreds of people.

I enjoy visiting Catholic churches and crypts, perhaps because I grew up in a largely protestant part of the Southern U.S. and the decadence of Catholic churches feels bizarrely ornate to me, even to the point of being grotesque. In the dim light I snapped a photo with my phone, an image which now features on the last page of The Fragile Blade. It might be my favorite image in the book, and at least in part because of how unexpectedly I had taken it. The body exists here as an object, quite visibly. An ultimate and irreversible kind of objectification. 

When Susan Sonntag wrote of photography, she called it a “soft murder”, noting how even the language we use to describe “shooting” and “capturing” a subject is violent, how photography can be possessive and predatory, reducing living subjects to objects, possessions. And indeed it can be vulnerable to be photographed, and abuse of power runs rampant. But I find Sonntag’s assessment a bit too pessimistic. There is also a thrill to being portrayed, to performing for the camera, and there is power in wanting to be seen and remembered. It is exactly this interplay which intrigues me - a balance of vulnerability and strength which is always shifting, negotiated and re-negotiated. How we can relate to our bodies in their peculiar vulnerability, and what role photography plays in that. 

The Fragile Blade explores these topics, portraying the relationship to the body and tracing its movement through childhood memory, love’s pleasure and pain, and the return to the inanimate in death. Photography, despite its ubiquity, remains a personal and intimate process. The photograph freezes time for an instant, preserving a moment with the uncanny quality of being both alive and dead - something a representation, a painting, couldn’t hold. It lies somewhere between representation and documentation - largely the reason for photography’s early exclusion from consideration as an art. The photographic image haunts us: the family album, the love-stained images from past relationships, the unflinching passage of time made apparent. What remains of two lovers who photographed each other constantly, the camera’s attention carefully marking the contours of the other’s form. 

The photograph’s power has long been connected to an idea of truth: photography as evidence, photography as a recording of a concrete reality. Until recently, the reality status of the photographic image was imbued with a degree of certainty which technological advancements in digital image editing (not to mention AI) increasingly call into question. For my work, however, I see photography not as a means of capturing an objective existence but rather as a way of breaking the passage of time - not to document reality precisely, but to play with it, to pull it apart, to rearrange it - with the hope that something remaining within it will haunt me, and perhaps, you as well.

The Fragile Blade will be officially released in October, 2025. You can order a copy of the photobook here.