Poignant Pics no.70: On Kristen Joy Emack’s “Fern”
Welcome to no. 70 in our series Poignant Pics, where our editor, Diana Nicholette Jeon, writes about Kristen Joy Emack’s image, “Fern.”
“When does a girl stop growing up? At puberty? At eighteen? When she marries? When she gets her first white hair? Or does she never feel she’s grown up no matter how old she gets? Is she still filled with girlish dreams when she takes her last breath?”
― Zülfü Livaneli
Several months back, before my year got crazy and I got way too far behind on the writing here, I saw this image by Emack on Instagram. I was immediately taken by how beautiful this work was. Emack, like many others, has been photographing her daughter for almost a decade. With the inclusion of her nieces as well, it resulted in the long-term project, Cousins, which has received a significant amount of attention, well-deserved, in my opinion. Emack is a 2022 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, arguably one of the most prestigious awards a photographer can receive.
For me, two things set this work apart from most work I see about children. First, each image in her series seems firmly cemented in tenderness and love above all else. Perhaps that is because as her child and nieces grew, she made them collaborators in the project rather than simply subjects. Maybe it is her worldview. Perhaps it is both or neither. I don’t have the answer, but Emack’s images radiate tenderness for me. The second thing is that, like me, Emack is the mother of a mixed-race child. Her child and her nieces are Black, and there are few works about the experience of suburban black girls/teens circulating in the art world.
About this particular image, Fern, Emack told me, “I had just finished my residency at MacDowell. I’d spent my time there looking at old family photographs, writing about Alzheimers, and comparing it’s capacity to spread across brain matter to the spores that wreck a good quart of strawberries with fuzzy mold. I was thinking about childhood, my mother’s and her mother’s , and the blind open eager steps they took into womanhood. I felt protected in my studio in the day by the big green sweep of Ferns that surrounded it, while I seemed to be visited by large delicate insects, owl calls and ghosts by night. Ferns are one of the oldest plants on Earth, adaptable, and present in diverse climates, populate by spores- not seeds, with deep stretches of root networks underground, and hundreds of tiny round mouths called stomata on each leaf that open and close to gulp up the gases in the air. Kayla was getting ready to go to her first year of college In NYC. We were all getting softly bracing ourselves for one of the cousins to be gone from the pack. She had turned 18, was facing new freedoms and started giving herself to the camera as a woman, and less like a child. We went out alone, without the younger girls into the quiet woods. Kayla lay in the ancient ferns and this image was born.”
Bravo, Kristen! Please keep bringing us more images radiating love, a thing which seems sorely lacking in the current fabric of American life.
Fern
Artist Bio
Kristen is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Mass Cultural Council Fellow, and a Saint Botolph Fellow. She is a CRITICAL MASS Top 50 Winner, a Michael Reichmann Project Grant recipient, and a PDN Emerging 30 nominee. Her interview in Vogue Italia was published in February 2020, and is a series winner in Lensculture. Kristen won first place in Social Documentary Network’s ZEKE Award, and has been shown at Photoville. She has work in several domestic and international magazines including, The Sun, OATH, The Curious Society, Whalebone, Clan, and interviews in Lenscratch and Click Rivista. She has been a guest on several Podcasts in both America and in Europe, and has been a guest speaker at universities including Hofstra and Harvard. Her work was recently exhibited in Miami curated by Pietro Daprano, and In The Ones To Watch Exhibition in Atlanta, curated by Mary Stanley, and at the Helsinki Photofest in Finland. Images are presently up at the Maryland Academy of Arts, and headed to Uppsala Fotofest in Sweden in September.
Kristen has two bodies of work that deal with girlhood, kinship, and visibility, and a finished series that examines loss. Kristen is represented by Gallery Kayafas, Boston.
More of her work can be found here.
Author Bio
Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.