This collection of images features photographic love letters that touch on the infinite varieties of love, from love of place to the emotional feeling of love, as well as the love that grounds us within conflict and purpose.

From the physical states of water to the metaphors within the water cycle, Kinship members celebrate the beauty, power, and depth of elemental water.

During Kinship’s mid-stream gathering, members shared images and brief stories that illuminated themes of beauty, ecology, advocacy, sensation, metaphor, and transformation. This gallery features some of the images from that online gathering.

Members of the Kinship community responded to a call to share their Water Stories as a way to begin our collective exploration of the element of Water. This gallery brings together some of the images from that gathering.

If fire speaks, what is it saying to us, especially in an era of climate breakdown and mass extinction? How can photography help us keep and tend to our elemental fire with care?

Between January and November 2024, seven Kinship community members gathered thirteen times to ‘reimagine’ loss and grief. Whether intentional or in our subconscious, we influenced one another in an unspoken call and response: One person’s vulnerability inviting others to let go; another person’s way of seeing inspiring new perspectives. Honestly and bravely we kept messing around in our collective ‘sandbox,’ letting the grit and grime that is loss and grief transform within, between and among us.

We’ve come together over the past year to explore embodied photographic practices that are grounded in the senses, shared conversations between bodies, noticed and deepened the relationships that connect all bodies. Along the way, we’ve been bringing our own bodies to photography, sharing personal and collective grief through image making, documenting natural disasters as we live through them, expressing the ways our bodies are intimately entwined with each other’s and the earth body we live in.

Kinship community members responded to three prompts adapted from Joanna Macy and Molly Brown’s book Coming Back to Life and recently featured on We Are The Great Turning podcast. These are our responses.

Where do our bodies end and other bodies begin? How does our understanding of the edges of our being influence us? For six weeks, practice group participants of A Complex Definition of a Body met and worked in a diverse range of photographic techniques to play with the complexity of defining what a body is.

Listening to the Land is a visual exploration of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail that features the photography of thirty-two artists. The photographs featured in this resonant and varied exhibition celebrate the region's rich biodiversity while honoring each person’s unique relationship with the land.

This dynamic exhibition reflects the visual experiences of twelve artists as they traveled in Bartram’s footsteps. Each artist worked in the spirit of curiosity, exploration, and wonder while reimagining this well-traveled landscape. Featuring images from coastal Georgia to North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, With Rapture & Astonishment invites viewers to enter an intimate world where Bartram’s trail is alive and waiting to be met and listened to anew.

This collection of photographs were made by students at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina and selected by Anna Helgeson and Susan Martin. Over the course of the Spring 2023 semester students interacted with Kinship in multiple ways including workshops, lectures, and photo responses to recorded gatherings. The end result is a diverse collection reflecting the multitude of ways that one can approach our relationships to each other and the natural world.

The photographers featured in this online gallery were participants in a contemplative photography workshop offered through The Rowe Center. Using whatever cameras they had available, photographers of all levels were invited to enter an intimate world where the landscape was alive and waiting to be met, understood, and listened to. The resulting photographs are full of subtle grace, beauty, tenderness, and co-creative vulnerability.

The eleven photographers featured in this exhibition reflected upon the same five-mile section of the Bartram National Recreation Trail for twelve weeks between Osage Overlook and Jones Gap near Highlands, NC. Many of the photographers featured here drew inspiration and guidance from William Bartram and the place-based traditions of diverse indigenous peoples, including The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who have stewarded this land for millennia and who freely shared their wisdom with William Bartram.

Since January 2022, Yvonne Dalschen and Morgain Bailey have been working together to create a weekly diptych that is inspired by documenting the landscape and the built environment.