I didn’t photograph my mother very often during the long months I spent watching her disappear. Despite a disconcerting lack of self-awareness, a side effect of the Alzheimer’s that eventually took her life, the camera made her self-conscious, and I couldn’t bring myself to subject her to that gaze. Instead, I pointed my camera in the other direction, curious to see what was happening outside our tiny bubble of meals and medication management. Gingerly at first, I began to tiptoe through the landmines crowding my emotional landscape; the earth was still spinning, even as I sat by her bed, perfectly still. Out there I found banal objects weighted with significance, beauty in the ordinary, and scenes so obviously beautiful I couldn’t bring myself to look. I documented each tiny discovery meticulously, almost scientifically, greedily hoarding every nuance of life and death in what felt like a state of desperation — an attempt to freeze the world until I was free to actually see it.

Julie Fowells grew up in the kind of small town every teenager wants to get out of, but now lives in Los Angeles, where she spends her time trying to recapture the kind of life she left behind… growing her own food and playing guitar in a rocking chair on the porch. This nostalgic approach to life in a major metropolitan city inspires an intense fascination in the tension between the city and the natural world — our desire to experience it, our need to contain it, and our attempts to push it aside.

Fowells has only recently returned to photography after a career as a musician, but both mediums have more in common than one might think: as in music, the good stuff happens in the space between things, and that’s where her interest lies. Her photographic practice endeavors to capture the fraught relationship between the environment and the people who inhabit it, attempting to tease out the narrative they create… especially as it reveals itself when all that’s left of a person is a trace.

For more information, visit: www.juliefowells.com