Water as Complex Metaphor in Mary West Quin’s Photographs In The Lionheart Gallery’s Summer Group Exhibition

Photographer Mary West Quin, who lives and works in Mobile, Ala., grew up around the fishing camps and boats of the Gulf of Mexico’s barrier islands, and her work is influenced by the often-oppressive  qualities of the Deep South. Not just heat and humidity but also lifestyle rituals, superficial niceties, and the social mores of the culture.  

“Oppression is uncomfortable,” she says. “For me, it keeps me searching.”  The searching takes place in the form of platinum palladium prints created with an 8x10 view camera, which distill and comment on the oppressive qualities of both climate and social conventions.

Moments in time that seem dispassionately frozen as permanent images turn out on closer inspection to be recordings of an  existence weighted with nuances and complexities.  Mary West Quin shoots the children from above, and the subjects have their eyes closed, masking any emotion. Their bodies, splayed for buoyancy, are motionless.

Titles such as “Baptism”, “Resurrection” and “Light and Water” suggest larger, more complex themes, and the sheer stillness of each scene imparts a narrative uncertainty.

It’s the photographer’s technique that ultimately establishes the defining tone. Water in this case is stripped of the hues and tonalities that usually define its metaphorical qualities; here the water is presented only in greyscale.  

Viewed one way, the children appear the opposite of free. They might instead be trapped in a hard surface like marble, their poses suggesting not the liberation of swimming, but rather being paralyzed by oppressive aspects of their ritualistic journeys of growing up in the Deep South.  

The photograph entitled “The Hiding Tree” translates the feeling of water as both liberator and captor into the woods. Here a dark haired girl is seen inside a secret cave created by the way giant roots of a massive tree have grown. The girl is holding a small root, her head thrown backwards over her shoulders so her upside down face is facing the camera. The dark tones, the massiveness of the tree, the unusual pose, and the isolation of the woods—all of it creates a very Southern Gothic feeling, if not a sense of foreboding. “The Hiding Tree” is an image of Mary West Quin’s son, Emmitt.