Journeys have a manner of shaping creativity. Sometimes they’re literal, tracing miles throughout highways and nameless metropolis streets. Other occasions, they’re inner, marked by dislocation, worry and the shifting methods we see ourselves in others. For Samantha Sutcliffe, each sorts of journeys converge in Broken Mirror, a photographic collection that has unfolded over the previous decade. The work follows her motion via America and thru her personal inside landscapes, amassing moments which might be uncooked, unusual and intimate. “The work evolved organically. My only rule was to follow my intuition, which is to get lost,” she explains, and that sense of drifting defines the collection.
Sutcliffe grew up in a small New Jersey city, the place her father’s fixed presence with a digicam and the darkroom he constructed of their basement turned her first training in images. “My father always had a camera, so I learned about photography through him,” she remembers. At 18, she moved to Brooklyn, imagining she may grow to be a nutritionist or social employee. “I flunked out of my 8am chemistry class because the commute from my apartment to Harlem was two hours on the 1/2/3 trains. I ended up missing my classes. Eventually, I got in a car and ended up on the West Coast for five years working in different factories and assisting on film sets until I decided to come back home.” This rhythm of departure and return, of shedding and reorienting, set the tone for her inventive follow.
Broken Mirror started in 2013 with an encounter with somebody she met via a Craigslist advert. “One of the first photographs from the series is of an older woman lying naked in her bed, which I took in 2013, when I was 22 years old. She lived in a cookie-cutter suburban complex and invited me over to take photographs for her husband, inspired by 50 Shades of Grey.” The {photograph} captures a suburban intimacy that’s each tender and uneasy, and it turned the muse for the venture. From there, one encounter led to a different. “One thing always led to the next,” she says, describing a course of that was by no means linear however as an alternative pushed by curiosity and intuition.
At first, Sutcliffe thought she was documenting different individuals, however over time, she realised she was additionally confronting herself. “I used to think I was documenting the ‘other’, but now I realise I’m confronting my own fears. I see myself in most of the photographs.” That recognition offers the collection its title and its cost. “The title comes from a childhood drawing of mine from 1996 that depicts a girl throwing herself into a vanity mirror surrounded by mistletoe.” It is a picture of shattering and reflection, a metaphor that has grown together with her work as she got here to see her topics not as strangers however as mirrors, refracting her personal alienation again at her.
The world of Broken Mirror is unmistakably American. Suburban houses, nameless roads, figures on the sting of visibility: they type a portrait of a rustic the place intimacy and estrangement sit aspect by aspect. Sutcliffe acknowledges the sociological undertones in her work. “After a decade of analysing alienation, I feel more like a sociologist than a photographer,” she says. Yet the photographs resist detachment. They are steeped in tenderness and discomfort, within the complexity of what it means to witness individuals who, in her phrases, “are misunderstood or challenge societal norms”.
I used to suppose I used to be documenting the ‘other’, however now I realise I’m confronting my very own fears – Samantha Sutcliffe
Her understanding of images shifted throughout the years she balanced this venture with paid work in New York City. “Between 2021 and 2023, I was frequently hired as an event photographer in New York City while pursuing my documentary work in the suburbs. I was being paid to take photographs of writers and influencers, and the images would end up circulating on social media for promotion. I took on the position of a content creator, and that freaked me out,” she explains. “I was a spectator of different social cliques but also an outcast, taking portraits of people in the limelight.” The distinction between the shiny circulation of these photos and the uncooked intimacy of her collection compelled her to rethink her function. “Now I recognise the value of my position as an outsider helped me understand the relationship between alienation and consumption. I view image-making a lot differently now. Photography once was a compulsion to be celebrated, and now it’s painful and brings me tears. I find more meaning in the images that I can not put online.”
The result’s that Broken Mirror feels virtually too personal for the digital age. It resists the simple circulation of content material, asking as an alternative for quiet consideration. Sutcliffe doesn’t give her viewers a hard and fast message however hopes for a extra open response: “I want the work to offer an unfiltered look at the human condition, particularly people who are misunderstood or challenge societal norms.” That unfiltered imaginative and prescient lingers in each {photograph}, the place moments of belief, estrangement and fragility are allowed to stay unresolved.
To take a look at Broken Mirror is to step inside a journey that’s each Sutcliffe’s and America’s: highways and bedrooms, strangers and reflections, loneliness and sudden intimacy. It shouldn’t be a neat portrait however a fractured one, the place each shard of the mirror reveals one thing totally different. In these fragments, Sutcliffe finds not solely her topics however herself – and invitations us to confront our personal reflections, nevertheless unsettling they may be.