Edgar lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology is a book-length set of poems, consisting of 244 elegiac monologues written in 1914, all of which are told by citizens who have risen from the dead to tell the stories of their demise in the mythical Illinois town of Spoon River. I first discovered the book when it was performed my freshman year of high school for our annual fall play. Cara wanted to audition but as I paged through the Anthology I found myself overwhelmed by what seemed at the time to be overly formal monologues of dead Midwesterners I couldn't connect with. I had also never really been in a play and at the last moment canceled my audition. Autumn rolled in and already the trees had lost the red, yellow, and brown leaves that define the season. Now it was November and the moth-eaten, velvet black curtain opened on the play. I sat with Cara, programs rolled in our hands in our dark high school theater, a place we both grew to love and find solace in. We sat next to the director of the play, a man who had done the job for decades and had given up acting because his body had been bent into the form of a question mark from a car accident. He was a fearless hunchback director leading these green teenagers and more than a bit terrifying himself. Cara was still angry with me for not auditioning and I was horrified by the sight of the actors who made the cut and remorseful, too, for not being up there myself.

We sat in the dark surrounded by parents of the cast members looking in on teenagers made to look old with black penciled wrinkles on their foreheads wearing absurd costumes fashioned as unlikely impostures for turn-of-the-century dress. They wore powder in unruly hair forced back in pins to convey the drama of a life hard lived. These were children yet to know real worry. But here they were a perfectly perplexing village already defeated by death in child birth, murder, failure, alcoholism, adultery, overdose, suicide--many of the situations that have claimed some of them now, my beloved twin among them.

I came back to the Spoon River Anthology because I was searching for a piece of American literature that would make the most interesting photographic series. I thought immediately of the high school play, the parents looking in on children acting out themes that were being performed at home in secret, what they most wanted to spare their own brood. I couldn't think of a better book to make photographs from and I set out to my high school costume loft and promptly took all of the costumes from the production and began using them in my recreation of the book. I hope to portray uneasy perspectives, in which the vicissitudes of the everyday leave lasting stories and silences, where fact and fiction converge and can exist simultaneously. With an eye toward the spiritualist movement in photography, which tapped into the devastation of the First World War, I seek to engage the literary gothic movement of which Masters was a part. The current climate of fear and death in our culture leads me back to these movements for a means to rearticulate, reengage: human suffering leads necessarily to the pursuit of a reason, of an explanation. I believe that Edgar Lee Masters understood this when he set out to write The Spoon River Anthology. Given the advent of digital technology and the prevalence of the tableaux, photography no longer exists as a convincing and indisputable documentation of fact. However, the necessity for the illustration of loss remains. The series as it exists now creates a fictional world for the fictional dead, a resting place that relies on the absurdity of its own description.

Whatever I was in Life: Spoon River was made at the MacDowell Colony over two years where I brought willing writers, composers, local residents, relatives and even my own students here into the woods to show themselves as they are and to ask them to become the most vulnerable parts of the characters I asked them to play. I told them almost nothing about the poem and give little direction. I hear my voice saying, "stand here, tilt your head that way, wear this costume that is too small, never smile." Somehow in all of this, trust is built and an image created. The pictures are large color photographs, 40x50 in size and taken with expired chrome film. As I make these images, which demand a certain amount of vulnerability from my subject I am constantly reminded of Masters's poetry--the moral I feel is made for photographers and writers, we who steal some to create a fiction for ourselves, the illusion of the strength of power and praise.