Renaissance Fairs (2003-2004)

My mother sold handcrafted clothing at Renaissance fairs when I was a child, independently supporting her three children as she trailed the fair routes up and down the east coast. My road trips are informed by this inheritance, by a familiarity with the road and the knowledge of how to properly outfit and live out of a van. I made frequent stops at festivals across the country to visit old friends, camping on site and recruiting people
to photograph. In part, these portraits belong to a wider autobiographical body of work made over the many years I spent on the road. But in the tradition of staged narrative photography, I made these pictures in conver- sations with pictorialism, particularly to Julia Margaret Cameron and her Shakespearean reenactments. These photographs afforded me the chance to consider performativity in photography. Here, its players perform gendered roles and act out a storied pursuit of authenticity held in the European roots of white Americans. The Renaissance reenactment fantasy holds an enduring, devotional appeal to its patrons, where even the promise of enlightenment is overshadowed by the weight of colonialism hard baked into an American story of origin.