Bodies Connected by Air

A Kinship photography practice group about the relationships we have to air.

Inhale, exhale

What is exchanged in an exhale, in a conversation, in song? How does respiration expand the edges of our bodies, and place us in conversation with the world around us? Where do we assign the boundaries of our bodies, if our respiration interacts and changes the environment we exist in, if we breathe in microbes that can change our health? How do we experience different types of air in our bodies, what effect does an oxygen rich forest have on us versus the smoke from a wildfire, the breeze from the ocean versus a highway clogged with traffic?

I feel the weight of pollen and mold in my chest, the wet spring bringing the bright hope and energy of a word renewing once again, and also blooming within a body that has trouble determining what is “self” or “other.” My chronic cough turns thick in the morning, calling to mind memories of sleepless nights bent over a bowl of boiling water as a child with severe asthma. I’ve been thinking for over a year about where my body’s edges are, or rather, how porous we all are.

I live with multiple chronic conditions, and much of my photography is exploring the ways my body interfaces with the world. This spring, I am deep in thinking about the ways that Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) has triggered an extreme sensitivity to the world around me, the ways my body demands an attentiveness to the environment, and the conversation that happens between within, and without.

We are all connected by air, by respiration cycles. The air that I breathe, you breathe, the tree outside my house breathes. The wind stirs the hair of my partner, rustles the miscanthus grass on the hill, stirs fire to life in the mountains. Southern air is heavy in summer, a thick curtain that hangs close, nearly perceptible in the haze it bestows upon lazy afternoons by the river. Air adds character to a place, influences how we feel in a place.

I’m looking forward to exploring air, our own bodies' unique relationship to air, and our relationships to other bodies by extension in an upcoming practice group I will be facilitating through Kinship Photography Collective soon. In Bodies Connected by Air, we will begin with noticing breath and air as it enters and leaves our own bodies. How can we photograph this ineffable exchange? I’ll bring some inspiration in the form of other photographers and artists who explore air and breath, as well as bring some questions and prompts to encourage us to explore this question together.

Then, we will shift to thinking beyond our own bodies, using self portraits and other photography techniques rooted in our senses to explore the relationships that we are a part of because of the air that we breathe. What do we exchange through breath? I’m excited to think beyond the human body with this group and consider the other relationships that other bodies have to air-how does a tree engage in a relationship to the air, or a mushroom, or a fish?

There are a few spots left in the daytime practice group session that meets on Thursdays from 12pm EDT to 2pm EDT from April 24th - May 22nd. If you are interested in joining the group, I invite you to read more on the Kinship website.

I inhale, feeling the expansion of my diaphragm against my ribs, feel the quality of the air in my nostrils. I exhale, my ribs settling against my lungs. Some part of me has been given, some part of me has been gained.