What stories are, and are not, ours to tell? And, how do archives work through, and speak across, multiple generations, informing memories and identities? In this conversation with artist and photographer Brooke C. White, we tackle these and many other questions.

With work exhibited internationally, White utilizes an approach to image-making that incorporates analog, digital, and historical photographic strategies. For more than twenty years, she has made work about the landscape, nature, and human relationships to place. In this conversation, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill discusses White’s most recent book, published with Immaterial Books, titled What She Saw. The project interweaves slides, photographs, drawings, journal entries, and travel logs inherited from the women in White’s family, which together, coalesce into a multi-generational familial collaboration. Throughout the book, the complexities of queerness, womanhood, and motherhood are made visible through small acts of resistance in the form of travel and photography. Part historical, part speculative, What She Saw reclaims the archive as a site of feminist inquiry, where familial ephemera is not merely received but actively re-imagined solidifying transient histories into newly re-imagined ones.

Notes:

Brooke C. White - https://www.brookecwhite.net/books

What She Saw - https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/what-she-saw-brooke-white

Allison Grant - https://www.allisongrant.com/within-the-bittersweet

Immaterial Books - https://www.immaterialbooks.com

Wyoming Toad - https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com/album/light-rail