Photography / Publishing

2025

7.5 x 9 in

Printed in bubblegum, bright olive green, and medium blue.

New York. Spring 2025

Edition of 60.

Diasporic Dissonance explores diaspora and translation. Shot on 35mm film in Nyansiongo, my ancestral home in rural Kenya, the photos document my Aunt Fenny’s funeral. They mark her sudden passing, which prompted an unscheduled journey home, and a moment in which I grappled with my lack of Swahili, the language in which my family primarily communicates. Without access to my mother tongue, I experienced the funeral proceedings in isolation. The photos attempt to translate what I didn’t have the language to express: grief, loss, and illegibility. 

Immersed in the experience of the funeral, but without language, I used the lens to capture the experience of not understanding my own culture. The subjects are obscured, bodies are shot from behind, or objects (here, chairs) are given depth by what is missing. They are marked by inaccessibility, whether of a seat without a body (see: Emptiness #1 and #2) or a back turned to the camera (see: Untitled #1). They are grasping toward the incomprehensible (see: With Arms Outstretched), whether that be the loss of my Aunt Fenny’s life or the grasp of my mother tongue. In all the photos, the environment provides solidity, the Earth being the place of permanence where a body or object might appear or disappear. 

Shot from within the tender disconnect of being tethered to a culture both inherent and removed, Diasporic Dissonance provides translations for emotions felt but unable to be expressed. They are an exploration of what is lost and gained when we leave home, and what Meena Alexander calls the “zone of radical illiteracy” the place from “which we translate our selves in order to appear, in order to be in place.” 

The artist book (pictured below) was riso-printed at the SVA RisoLAB.

Images: Angeliea Stark.