When We Go

Project In Progress

When I was a young girl, my father briefly worked as a police officer handling domestic violence cases within my hometown in Northeast Ohio. As I grew up, the horrors my father described to me became the reality so many women in my community were facing. There was a hushed undertone of violence, high school girls showing up to class with bruises, casual conversations about lit cigarettes being flicked at us, the occasional story of a girl running away to simply escape. Everyone here seemed to have a ghost story.

As I grew up, I became fascinated by horror as a genre, entranced by stories of the paranormal. Through research I discovered that the godfathers of horror filmmaking were war vets, traumatized by what they witnessed away at sea. While making films that encapsulated fear that was beyond belief, they found a way to reclaim their trauma. After learning this, I wondered: What would the women of my hometown make, given the chance to reclaim their stories? What could I do to finally overcome my own trauma?

I began photographing the very spaces I had tried so desperately to avoid, reenacting scenes I had had nightmares about. With the help of a friend who has experienced her own horror story, Caitlyn Kingery, we went through my hometown and documented the spaces and things that reminded us of our own unease.

During this time, a young woman I had gone to high school with, Raychel Sheridan, would go missing. It became clear, now more than ever, that the women of Northeast Ohio were being haunted by generational abuse and pain - and deserved an opportunity to reclaim and rewrite their story. In, "When We Go", I am reimagining these stories passed on through word of mouth - beginning with my own.