Introduction
The Lighthouse and How She Got There
The Lighthouse Project takes place in a 19th century Anglo world of Dickensian institutions and vast moorlands and tundras where urchins and strays struggle to find their way. Shedding, excision and new growth provide the backbone of these photographs, which explore the tumult of a girlhood slipping away and the maiden voyage of a young woman in wild and unsettling territory. The digitally composited images tell the story of a girl, the inmate of a workhouse / asylum who escapes when the building burns down. Freed from her menial existence, she wanders through barren countryside where bogs threaten to swallow her whole and sheer cliffs impede her progress. The titles of each piece - which are derived from the first lines of Victorian novels with orphan protagonists – function as narrative hooks that draw one to the plight of the lost child star who narrowly escapes disaster and soldiers on. From image to image she gradually gets her bearings as she approaches the lighthouse, her ballast and lodestar that beckoned to her from her dormitory window in the asylum. In one ending of the story, she is taken in by the lighthouse keeper. In another, she falls prey to swampy secretions and decay while resting in a field. A third version has her coming back to the rebuilt institution as the favored ward of the superintendant while acting as a double agent and escaping with a rag tag girl posse across the sea. The girl gains resolve (and grows up literally) over the course of the series. She started being photographed at 12 - she is now 16.
A good movie instantly captivates the viewer who lives and breathes an alternate reality for the duration of the film. The Lighthouse pictures target such a feat of emotional entanglement with its girl heroine - through still images with built-in pauses, large scale photographic tableaux that convey immediacy and veracity through their formidable size and amplified vividness. Each photograph portrays a dramatically sensitive moment, a visual lynchpin in the character-transforming quest of the young subject. The viewer must fill in the blanks of the drama, identifying with the familiar tale of the lost orphaned child and responding to mythic symbols (i.e. the white horse, the dour school mistress, the haunted house) which guide the way and supply the connective tissue between images. Resonating with the glass eyeball embedded in each frame, the girl relentlessly pursues her search for an intact I, doggedly picking up the lost pieces of her shattered self and gluing them back together - and sweeping us along in the universal struggle for belonging and a home.