PROJECT STATEMENT

HEATHER LYNN SPARROW

DEAR WORLD GOODBYE  

  These youth have grown up on screens, looking in on an adult society where we ignore and cover up our problems, instead passing them on to the younger generation. They are overwhelmed with sensationalized media, distractions of consumerism, and fears inspired by climate change and political folly. 

Suicide is the leading killer of teen youth in the US.

    Evolving their own rituals over the course of several years and locations, circling back to my son’s room as the stage where they were given freedom to create an improvised theater of loss, Dear World Goodbye/The Dark is Light series of photographic portraits was made in collaboration with teens grieving the suicide of their friend/their brother, my son, Trempealeau Hagios Morninglight. This is a subset of my work with youth. Teaching photography in the public schools, after-school workshops, and traditional portraiture. My (our) photography provides extreme focus, time, and dignity to process grief, midwifing youth into adulthood.

     Documenting my community’s reality while fabricating part of it through ritual, my photographs expose and resolve problems.  As my children and their friends grew older, darker experiences unfolded, and photography became the most elegant way to describe that which is deeply disquieting. 

     By respecting young adults, while addressing topics that our culture has failed to prepare them for, this project created a space of shared learning, allowing for personal growth, and by extension, social change.

  The visibility and scaffolding of this show will provide the impetus to revisit my 27-year body of work in Taos with youth in ritual fine art portraiture, help fund suicide prevention, and a memorial at the Taos Gorge Bridge, while making explicit connections to how photo rituals can work both artistically and transformatively to address the crisis of teen suicide. 

heatherlynnsparrow.com