Letter to My Daughter, 2023
Video, 16 minutes
Viewing link available upon request
Letter to My Daughter is an autobiographical video directed to my five-year-old daughter, Elinor, that centers around my experience with parenthood throughout the first five years of her life. The audio soundtrack is my voice reading a letter to Elinor, and the images are from my personal archive and include snapshots, ultrasound images, and photographs from Family Pictures. The letter is highly personal and addresses a variety of topics, including my expectations around parenthood, the long and circuitous journey of trying to have a child with both known and anonymous sperm donors, the experiences of miscarriage and loss, and my adjustment to parenthood as a queer and nonbinary person. Perhaps most importantly, it tries to put into words the intensity of love between a parent and child as well as the significant personal growth parenthood both inspires and requires.
Letter to My Daughter is part of my larger exploration of family. It is in dialogue with my 2017 video, Letter to My Father, which explores my estranged relationship with my father, as well as my long-term series of photographs Family Pictures (2012-present), which focuses on the intimacy of familial relationships, aging, and the passage of time through an extended look at three generations of my family.
Letter to My Father, 2017
Video, 14 minutes 54 seconds
Viewing link available upon request
Letter to my Father is an autobiographical video exploring my estranged relationship with my father. In the video, I read an undelivered letter to my father, in which I try to come to terms with our difficult and distant relationship. The video is comprised of snapshots of myself, family, and friends, pulled entirely from my own personal albums.
The open letter weaves together my childhood, my early gender nonconformity, my parents’ divorce, my queer identity, personal relationships, my spouse, my desire to create a family and become a parent, and – ultimately – my father’s inability to accept me and our eventual estrangement.
Through the telling of a highly personal story, the video grapples with two fundamental desires, often placed in direct opposition to one another: the need to live authentically and the desire for acceptance from others.