Elementals

Elementals was a year-long call for engagement that invited photographers to explore their relationship with elemental air, water, fire, and earth. Drawing on the Elementals book series from the Center for Humans & Nature, we met in weekly gatherings and practice groups to explore personal and collective projects. Each season brought a new elemental focus that guided our discussions and practice—always inviting deeper questions about living an elemental life.

black and white photograph created with intentional camera movement featuring dozens of crosses in a flowing wave of light and shadow.

Phil Lewenthal

Anna Rotty

March 20th - June 20th, 2025

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?

Air

FEATURED PROJECTS

Featured

Memories & Promises - Jeffrey DeCristofaro

Jeffrey DeCristofaro’s images look both behind and forward, capturing the elegance and magic of past moments while hinting - and holding on to - the promise of a better future, all while still in the grasp of time, space, and all surrounding elements that compose and shape our lives and destinies.

‘in the ground of my beseeching’ - Kate Kennington Steer

Poet, contemplative photographer, and visual artist Kate Kennington Steer explores the element of air in this mixed-media video featuring spoken-word poetry and imagery.

Untethered - Phil Lewenthal

Phil Lewenthal reimagines the interplay of the elements on California’s north coast—embracing both meditative landscapes and chaotic urban environments.

Thin Air: George Lottermoser

For George Lottermoster, images and titles feel as though they appear out of Thin Air, as he finds himself “aging out of aliveness”.

COLLABORATIONS

Featured

Shared Air

This collection of images is a collaborative gallery by the Kinship community exploring the infinite and ever moving and changing qualities of Air.

April McNiff

Julia Nagai

June 21st - September 21st, 2025

Fire is both wild and domestic, destructive and generative. Life is fueled by fire, from plants creating energy through photosynthesis to the inner fires that spark meaning within our lives. Fire invites us to do the alchemical work of justice and change as well as the tender relational work of love and care. In what ways do the many manifestations of fire bring us in closer relationship with our earthly kin? What is revealed through the spark of our photographic attention? And how might our photography practices inspire us to sustain our own internal fires as darkness descends?

Fire

FEATURED PROJECTS

Featured

she asked me to be her keeper - Megan Driving Hawk

She asked me to be her keeper, features photographs that accompany Megan Driving Hawks' poem at the Summer Solstice. This kindred collection of images and words transcends time and reminds us of the power of photography to stir deep and even ancient memories.

Fire as Gesture - April McNiff

Photographed at night in the forests of western North Carolina, April McNiff moved—sometimes danced—across the landscape, allowing gestures of fire to unfold within darkness.

‘lit’ - Kate Kennington Steer

Poet, contemplative photographer, and visual artist Kate Kennington Steer explores the element of fire in this mixed-media video featuring spoken-word poetry and imagery.

Light Passed Between Us - Frances Bukovsky

In Light Passed Between Us, Frances Bukovsky explores how a relationship to place can shape a partnership. In this tender imagery fire is expressed through both light and love.

Alchemy: Alli Harper

Alchemy explores elemental fire as a powerful symbol of transformation, representing both renewal and destruction. In Alli’s work, fire symbolizes purification, spiritual connection, passion, and even danger. Everything fire touches is transformed.

COLLABORATIONS

Featured

Invitation to Love

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.

Fire Celebration

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?

Alli Harper

Olivia Fulmer

Water

September 22nd - December 20th, 2025

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?

FEATURED PROJECTS

Featured

Water’s Many Essences - George Lottermoser

In this portfolio, George Lottermoser dedicated undistracted attention to Water, contemplating the water filled womb and the various forms of Water’s Many Essences.

Rain Pieces - John Ryan Brubaker

In this series, John Ryan Brubaker observes the microclimatic shifts atop the ridge where he lives to engage with the rainforest nature of the place. John used 19th-century Van Dyke and Cyanotype photographic processes to record water and sunlight.

Collaborations with an Accidental Lagoon - John Ryan Brubaker

John Ryan Brubaker’s small cyanotypes were made with the help of ocean waves, on the shore of a lagoon, beside the Cretan Sea, behind a site of industrial abandon on the North shore of the city of Iraklio.

After Helene - Casey Visco

After Helene is a document of the aftermath of the record flooding due to Hurricane Helene in Asheville’s River Arts District. Photographs were taken in the months after the storm during the initial cleanup phase of the debris.

‘mother you display me as pearlescent’ - Kate Kennington Steer

Poet, contemplative photographer, and visual artist Kate Kennington Steer explores the element of water in this mixed-media video featuring spoken-word poetry and imagery.

Ice Remembers - Alli Harper

Ice is the archivist of the world, holding centuries in its translucent layers. Each trapped bubble is a whisper of ancient winds, a chronicle of forgotten seasons—snowfall, ash, storms, and sunlight pressed into memory.

Not so still life: The way water flows through the natural, mystical, and man-made — Julia Nagai

Julia Nagai’s dreamy exploration explores how water flows from humans to their co-creations with nature, and connects them to what may lie beyond the physical realm of our Earth.

Water, Water Everywhere - Brenda Spielmann

Brenda Spielmann’s poetic book explores the interplay between nature, mythology, and our relationship with water. You are invited to step into the bones of an ancient world where the landscape is the storyteller, and myth and reality blur.

COLLABORATIONS

Featured

Delta: An Elementals Water Collaborative Gallery

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

Mid-Stream Journeys

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.

Water Stories

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.

Casey Visco

Kaye Savage

Earth

December 21st, 2025 - March 18th, 2026

Earth is living matter, place and planet—soil, ground, and home. Here, all elemental beings are woven together into diverse forms of matter. Earth bodies and human bodies are inseparable. With Earth, we find our form and weave meaning from the complexity and multiplicity of our earthbound experiences. What depths can be found in Earth’s cycles? Can embodied photographic practices inspire earthy perspectives that awaken the transformative power of humility, interdependence, connection, and care? Through practice, can we foster co-creative and collaborative partnerships with the living earth that invite mutual flourishing?

FEATURED PROJECTS

Featured

Still Life - Liz Titone

Still Life is an ongoing meditation on observation as a form of knowing. Walking is how I keep time with the world. I collect what I find at the edges of my sight, frequently led there by my dog's inquisitive snout. Seedpods, bark, flowers, and nests in various states of decay and transformation make their way back with me, where the exploration continues on an old flatbed scanner.

African Burial Ground: A Study of Difference, Disappearance and Resistance - Yvonne Dalschen

For over 10 years, Yvonne Dalschen has been visiting, tracing the indentations and fieldstones for the Africans in bondage on one side of the road, and the groomed headstones of the enslavers on the other—wondering at the unseen hands paying respect, moving and disappearing.

The Peach Tree - Dani Fresh

Dani Fresh explores neighboring, stewardship, and reciprocity in The Peach Tree. In this sequence, Dani goes out into the rare sunlight winter days of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as a way to feed her during the long wintering of Pennsylvania winters.

Farthest North - Gwen Walstrand

Gwen Walstrand’s fictional and fragmented images, made from camera-less chemigrams and collaged snippets from her own photographs, attempt to slice through history, space, galaxies, and reconfigure our understanding of our position in the world as both precarious and hopeful.

Greenhouse Portals - Julia Nagai

Julia Nagai found herself stepping into a world of portals, connecting the local to the global. In this portfolio, she invites us into an enchanting journey through the greenhouse doors.

Season of Earth - Chris Warner-Carey

Season of Earth offers us a glimpse into the ordinary yet beautiful moments of life being made and unmade. At the heart of this work is a quiet sensitivity to life’s shifting and changing rhythms.

Bodies Connected by Earth - Anna Rotty

Anna Rotty responds to things bound, in space and in long, drawn-out time…Rock, sediment, earth, aridification of small plots of property in her neighborhood.

A Walk in the Park - Casey Visco

Casey Visco’s photographic observations were made during daily walks in the riverfront parks and trails around Asheville, North Carolina. Visco’s work reminds us that our ordinary earthbound moments can be full of beauty and quiet meaning.

In This Place - Paul Wanta

In This Place celebrates the intimate and familiar places near Paul Wanta’s home in Wendell, Massachusetts. As an experienced wildlife tracker, Paul is especially attuned to capturing subtle changes and nuances within the specific parameters of the places he thoughtfully wanders.

COLLABORATIONS

Featured

Apr 6, 2026

The Heart of Matter

Apr 6, 2026

Together, the Kinship community engaged with the element of Earth. This season brought us into a relationship with Earth as living matter—soil, ground, and home. Here are some of the answers by the community that were given to the Earth call.

Apr 6, 2026

May 27, 2024

In Praise of the Earth: Honoring Joanna Macy

May 27, 2024

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.

May 27, 2024

Tracy Warren

Kaye Savage

An Elemental Life

March 20th, 2025 - April 22nd, 2026

During our yearlong exploration, some Kinship photographers explored questions and responses across all the elements. At the confluence of air, fire, water, and earth, they brought the elements into conversation with one another by asking the practice-oriented question, What is an elemental life? If the elements are kin to one another, what does it mean to live in kinship with the elements? If kinship is replacing individuality as our frame for living a good life, then how are the elements—the interconnected ingredients of our interstellar sphere of kin—telling us how to live our daily lives? What practices or rituals can help us keep the elementals alive in our creative lives?

FEATURED PROJECTS

Featured

Ghosts of the River - Susan Preston

Ghosts of the River is an ongoing labor and ritual of bearing witness to the pain of a vanishing river. Over three summer seasons, with dust billowing through my hair and mud caked to my boots, my heart carried my body and my camera into the cracking and evaporating spine of a once “Grande” River.

An Elemental Life - Tracy Warren

An Elemental Life is a year-long photographic practice that explores the body’s connection to air, fire, water, and earth. Tray Warren’s images call the body to movement and invite an intimate dialogue with animate elemental beings.

Wandering / In My Neck of the Woods - Kaye Savage

Thirty-five years ago, Kaye Savage and a group of friends sat on a front porch with a bucket of plaster, a jar of vaseline, and a pair of soda straws to cast their faces. Last autumn, Kaye began taking her mask for walks in natural spaces she loved the most, capturing moods and a feeling of home