The Girls Were Here is a photographic meditation on the power of belief and the imagination.

Found still lifes in places of personal resonance, the body of work considers how photography intersects with faith, spirituality, and the human desire for connection to the spiritual world. It draws inspiration from love and loss, the yearning for certainty and the acceptance of its impossibility.

Following the passing of loved ones, I discovered suggestions of their continued albeit transformed presence at home or on neighborhood streets. Guided by ideas about seeing and belief found in literature, including Genesis, and in the Spiritualist movement, which asserted that the spirit exists beyond the body and that the spirits of the dead communicate with the living, I used my 8x10 camera to capture my findings.

One day, after rain, I found the vestiges of the words “The Girls Were Here” written in green chalk on a bench in a park that we often visited. This was a sign to continue my search. To believe.