Elementals

Elementals is a year-long call for engagement that invites photographers to explore their relationship with the elements. As we move through the elemental wheel of the year, each season will bring a new elemental focus that will guide our discussions and practice. However, we encourage you to work with the elements as they speak to you and your photographic practice, especially when exploring the places where elements overlap and alchemize. Drawing on the Elementals book series from the Center for Humans & Nature, we will explore these and other questions, always inviting deeper questions about our elemental lives:

If the elements are kin to one another, what does it mean to live in kinship with the elements?
In kinship, can photography help us remember the vital and tender beauty that connects us in elemental ways?

With practice, can photography inspire new ways of seeing and responding that embrace elements of vulnerability, longing, and loss alongside the possibility of intimacy, communion, joy, and belonging?

In what ways do we experience the elements in our bodies? How can we use photography to reveal where the elements live in us?

As we practice together through the elemental seasons, we invite you to join us for weekly gatherings and practice groups where we explore and examine different aspects of our elemental lives within a supportive community.

Air

Infinite and always in motion, air is unutterably old, and its spirit carries with it the story of everything. Is there anything more ordinary and extraordinary than air? How can we use photography to engage with the more ethereal nature of being? In what ways can air offer breathing room, allowing our imaginations to thrive? And when we ‘play’ with air, what spaciousness emerges not just in our photography practices, but also in our relationships with our earthly kin?

Tracy Warren

Paul Wanta

Fire

Fire remains wild, increasingly so today, but its domestication changed the course of human evolution. 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 relations with this element with care? In what ways do the many manifestations of fire bring us in closer relationship with our earthly kin? And how might our photography practices inspire us to sustain our own internal fires as darkness descends?

Kaye Savage

Marie Bongiovanni

Water

As a living presence, the circulation and flow of healthy waters make life on Earth possible and defines our very existence. How can photography invite us to ponder the traditions, perspectives, and aspirations linked to this vital element? In what ways does the flow of water around us and within us make us feel alive?

Casey Visco

Frances Bukovsky

Earth

Earth is living matter, place, and planet; soil, ground, and home. How can photography inspire earthy perspectives and elemental paths toward an ethic of interdependence, connection, and care for planet, place, and relations? In what ways can photography reveal the ways in which we are creatures who exist because of generational, collaborative, creative, and earthen exuberance?

Lyn Swett Miller

Mike Belleme

Make Elemental Kin with Us

While the Kinship call for engagement is the hub of our community, your courageous and generous sharing is the heart. At Kinship we celebrate the embodied collective wisdom of the community and the surprises that arise in the shared space between us. Through community gatherings, practice groups, collaborative prompts, courageous sharing, and curated exhibitions, we find new ways of making meaning together.

We hope you will join us on this quest of questioning, exploring, and discovering as we move together through the elemental year (you can join in at any time).

If you are new to Kinship, please check-out these resources: