Hi, guys...

Below is the text of Andrea Barrett's introduction to Elizabeth Siegfried's book of images, "LifeLines."  It's worth reading a few times -- perhaps once before you see the images and once after....

        The miniature gardens I once built from pebbles and shells and gulls’ feathers, the vertebrae of striped bass and the delicate bones of eels, didn’t seem odd to me, when I was a girl--what could be more natural than to use one kind of thing to make another? Relics might shape something alive. Parts might be gathered into a whole; a handful of petals might suggest an entire bed, as pine needles might a forest. The element of magic at the heart of such transformations I noticed only when I looked up from my constructions to find, for a moment, the world’s actual trees and boulders grown unfamiliar.

          Later, as an adult, I happily discovered such transformations at the heart of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Completed almost two millennia ago, the Roman poet’s greatest work offers characters caught in moments of crisis, poised between one state of being and the next. Their transformations are sudden and startling, each one emphasizing both the mutability (a girl may turn into a laurel tree) and stability (the tree retains what is most characteristic about the girl) of our essential selves. Not much, these tales suggest, separates human and other forms of life. Equally little might separate the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead.

          Elizabeth Siegfried’s photographs offer a similarly fluid vision of the self in relation to the natural world. One essential and long-standing inspiration for that vision has been a family camp, built by her great-grandparents at the turn of the twentieth century in northern Ontario. In an earlier sequence entitled >A Sense of Place,< Siegfried explicitly interwove historical images of her great-grandmother, contemporary self-portraits, and images of that camp then and now. Here, in LifeLines, she abstracts from the same place elements representative of aging, change, and connection to the larger world.

          In the aptly titled “Sanctuary,” for instance, there is nothing to identify the body of water in which these tiny, gleaming fish so radiantly gather. No boundaries, no nearby house or tree, no bordering beach: this might be any body of water filled so bountifully with life. Elsewhere she similarly abstracts bits of the camp (door, lock, wall, floor) and of herself (hands, torso, hair) to create a narrative that is both intimate and restrained.

          The narrative--for these photographs do form a narrative--opens with “White,” a figure of great tension. Most noticeable, at first, is the sexuality suggested by the half-open robe, unfurling at one shoulder and hinting at the breast to be uncovered next. Just visible, above, is a strand of tumbled hair, juxtaposed with the first lines of aging engraved across the neck. Behind the figure are handsomely weathered boards; below them a piece of worn wicker, butting up against the white robe.

          So far, so good--these elements work singly and together to suggest fullness, ripeness, serenity, even a certain peace. But what, then, are those fiercely clenched hands doing at the center of the image? Both are knotted over her womb, around a sash that is itself knotted. The knuckles reveal what lies beneath: white bone.

          Yet it is in this juxtaposition of peace and panic, fullness and emptiness, that the narrative sequence begins to unfold--a painful journey toward acceptance of the inevitable process of aging, paired with an increasing sense of connection to the natural world. In one image, the richly veined and lined hand of an elderly woman is clasped in a more youthful, yet otherwise remarkably similar, hand. Forefinger and thumb of the younger hand touch in the Buddha’s gesture of unity. The older hand, embraced by the younger, seems to be both growing out of it and turning into it: the circle of life is contained and complete in the pair.

          The figure in these photographs, we realize--as with all the other forms of life portrayed, grass and spiders and fish and trees, deer and turtles, the myriad creatures of coral--is caught always in the process of becoming. In another image, a reclining woman, familiar by now, somehow encompasses several stages of a life. A youthful torso and breasts, a soft, relaxed hand--but also a blurred, shattered face suggestive of a death-mask. The hand holds a dried white jawbone, the teeth aligned with the figure’s sternum as if the skeleton beneath the skin is secretly closer than we might suppose. It may be predatory; it may be consuming itself, or consuming us: teeth lie right below the smoothly fleshed shell of life.

          A shell appears more literally in “Cradle,” where it’s held--protectively? acceptingly? despairingly?--over the anonymous figure’s womb. Behind it is a living body, and behind the body a door. On the door is a lock; but the lock is open. In some cultures these large shells--this one once held a snapping turtle--were used as infants’ cradles.

          In “Radiant,” which offers the same figure in the same silky white shift, everything is suddenly different. The rigid pose has relaxed; one hand softly spreads above the heart and over the lungs while the other cradles, as it might an infant’s head, a piece of coral. The coral, which seems to grow from the navel through liver, heart, and lungs, resembles veins and arteries cast in stone, reticulated branches arcing electrically through the living body.

          Every image here rewards our attention similarly. Many are self-portraits, which have always formed a significant portion of Siegfried’s work. But what I find particularly fascinating is that these photographs, while intensely personal on one level, are also beautifully impersonal. The images of Siegfried’s body and hands (only rarely does she incorporate her face) are emblematic rather than individual.

          From the lines of her body and her life, and in the relationships of these to the lines of nature--a spider’s web, the veins of a leaf, a massed school of fish, a sea of dried grass--Siegfried forges powerful emblems of transformation. By the time we’ve reached the end of her tale we watch, amazed, as the water held captive by each of us, no more than can be grasped incompletely in one hand, streams back in a flow of light to the sea.

    Andrea Barrett
    Rochester, New York

You can get to Betsy's LifeLines gallery by clicking here: