Erma Jean
This body of work is dedicated to the combat airmen in the European Theatre of Operations who were imprisoned in Stalag Loft I, Barth, Germany, as prisoners of war.
One of those pilots was Raymond G. Wiethorn, my Grandfather. The Nazi soldiers captured and imprisoned him beginning on December 23, 1944, when his C47 was shot down by enemy fire during the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken hostage, tortured, and interrogated before being sent on a death march across Germany. Many of his fellow POWs succumbed to illness or death at the hands of their captors.
My grandfather was just 23 years old.
In the spring of 2019, I traveled to Barth, Germany, to understand what happened to him and what it meant to be held captive during wartime.
Acres of sacred and haunted land sprawled out before me. How can a landscape hold the two of us all at once and not at all? Using his archive of images taken during his time in the service and as a prisoner, I am getting to know a man I never truly met. This work is a conversation between two generations, alive and gone. This is for the man who sailed ships in the sky.
Erma Jean was the name of my grandfather’s lost C47 supply plane.
Love You More
The relationship between a mother and a daughter is complicated. As an adult, I am relearning who my mother is, not as my mother, but as her own person filled with hopes, dreams, and worries. As children, our parents are timeless, a constant in our lives if we are lucky. Seeing my mother age is a beautiful and terrifying experience.
Coming to terms with my mother's mortality has led me to reconsider our relationship. In this series, I am finding what’s changed between both of us; rediscovering the complicated history we share both as mother and daughter, and the secrets that are just ours. What used to be strained, silent, and untrusting has changed into acceptance, vulnerability, and growth. Love you More, is an ongoing exploration of the openness and intimacy of our relationship as two adult women, mother and daughter, and photographer and subject.
I now understand what it means to be the daughter of a daughter. In my search to understand the relationship with my mother, I had to confront the secrets and sins of her relationship with her mother and how she became the woman she is. Over the course of nearly 9 years, my mother and I have been rebuilding and confronting our relationship. I am slowly finding what’s changed between both of us; rediscovering the complicated history we share both as mother and daughter, and the secrets that are just ours. Love You More is an ongoing exploration of the openness and intimacy of our relationship as two adult women, mother and daughter, and photographer and subject. During our time together, we have reconnected in new ways and grown to understand each other. We have crossed boundaries and built bridges with our photographs. Collaboration and mutual respect are key in this body of work; we aim to understand the human connection that exists between the camera, the artist, and the subject.