Jenna Howland

I’m building a tomb with my photographs; a graveyard to hold spaces that were left behind, sealed in black and white 35 mm film. With my camera, I capture spaces that are lonely and abandoned; touched by human presence at one point maybe, but long forgotten, probably not noticed by anyone until I capture them.

My work focuses on things that have been left behind, when the people who owned or lived in them have left spaces to decay and become buried. I am most interested in the line between abandonment and simply fading into nothing, when those who care for objects and spaces are long gone but the objects stay put. I never capture people or anything truly alive, but are the spaces still haunted by human presence?

Growing up in New England where the pilgrims first settled, it seemed to me that every pile of rocks or abandoned stack of split wood was embedded with some kind of history; haunted with the past. I liked old things, and being an angsty young New Englander I was attracted to the veil of morbid history and death that lingered in antique stores, barns, and deep in the woods. I could spend hours peeking through dusty books and taking in the smell of their age. Dark basements and cobwebbed cellars seemed to be packed to the brim with something exciting for me to observe and hold and wonder about, even if it was some kind of decrepit junk like a single muddy shoe or a rusty box of nails.

As I got older I experienced real loss and saw death. I saw and heard people die. I learned how the most stable spaces can crumble, and the perceptions I built around them could shatter in a moment. Death and rubble and burial in front of me, not the ghost stories and child-like curiosity I built up in my childhood. It hit me like a ton of bricks.

Buried in deep depression, I began to see old objects and dusty cellars differently. They were part of something; remnants of someone’s past. An old cellar can be a window into the past, but it’s also a graveyard.

I spent years digging myself out a grave that I buried myself in, and it was only through my writing and photography practice that I clawed my way out and started breathing again. My work is a tomb, but it was also my way out.