Echo Echo

“Echo Echo” focuses on my daughter and is named after her. All of the images were taken during the first year of the pandemic. While my personal life has always inspired my practice, this is my most explicitly autobiographical work. It felt like a necessity to make photographs of our experience as we lived through an unprecedented time. We left Brooklyn for rural upstate New York for what was supposed to be two weeks, and we never resumed our lives in Brooklyn. During the time period in which these images were recorded, I was working from home, teaching my daughter, caring for her, and acting as her “friend” since she is an only child and we were completely isolated in the early pandemic.

During a period marked by fear, making these images was a means of uncovering beauty in daily life. The photographs reflect my deep concern for how the pandemic will affect her, and they are a record for Echo in the future. I felt uncharacteristically compelled to share the photographs on social media during the course of making them; it helped connect our experiences with those of others during isolation. Ultimately, the intense psychological and physical connection between mother and daughter is at the heart of this work, an intimacy forever effected by and made more extreme by quarantine times.