Review Santa Fe: Julia Cluett: Dead Reckoning

In early November 2025, I used to be invited to CENTER’s Review Santa Fe. Being my first time within the Southwest and expertise on the Reviewer facet of the desk, I wasn’t fairly certain what to anticipate. As an educator, I like reviewing work; when others hear “critique,” they might shrink back, however I like the expertise of serving to others via their concepts. Review Santa Fe is an extremely welcoming expertise, fastidiously cultivating significant initiatives and conversations. Living in a really rural space, this was an inspiring alternative to see what’s on the horizon of the picture world. I’m so excited to share a number of of those initiatives over the primary week of February.

Today, we’ll be sharing Julia Cluett’s Dead Reckoning.

Journeys, inward or outward, are the inspiration for Julia Cluett’s pictures. Whether portraiture or landscapes, her images convey intimacy and vulnerability, inviting contemplation in on a regular basis moments. Julia’s images have been exhibited in member and juried exhibits on the Curated Fridge and on the Griffin Museum of Photography, the place she acquired a juror’s award from Ann Jastrab.  Her mission, Dead Reckoning, was juried into Review Santa Fe in 2025.

Julia has studied pictures with Joyce Tenneson and David Hilliard on the Maine Media Workshops + College, and with Emily Belz within the Photography Atelier on the Griffin Museum.

Julia holds a bachelor’s diploma from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and a Master’s in Social Work from Salem State University (Salem, MA).

When Julia is just not behind the lens, she helps people and households at end-of-life as a grief therapist in Massachusetts.

Follow Julia on Instagram: @juliascluett, @moodlexicon

Dead Reckoning

I work in hospice and far of my consideration facilities on soothing different individuals’s nervousness about demise.

But what about my very own?

Despite a lifelong sample of churchgoing, choir singing and worship in indoor areas, I confess I lack a pure religion. Rather, my curiosity and questioning have taken root within the exterior world, the place I encounter a life power that’s promising, common, and perpetual. The outdoor is my sanctuary; strolling on trails in New England is my very own type of prayer.

This mission explores areas that supply refuge within the face of demise nervousness – my very own or others’.

For some, the purpose-built, “always open” chapels and meditation rooms in hospitals and hospice homes are secure harbors providing quietude, ritual, and luxury alongside a fraught medical journey at finish of life. For others, the pure world reveals itself as sacred floor. Punctuated by sudden washes of sunshine and devoid of individuals, these seemingly disparate settings draw consideration to the connection between our exterior environments and our inside worlds of beliefs and feelings.

Dead Reckoning is an invite to stillness, consideration, and contemplation – indoors and outdoor – for these confronting the unsettling questions that demise and dying usher in.

How did your mission come about?

This mission grew out of questions – my very own and others – when finish of life attracts close to.

• Where will we go once we die?
• Where will we search solace within the face of demise nervousness?

And this physique of labor is knowledgeable by two hats that I put on – one as a photographer…

And one as a hospice social employee, supporting individuals as they close to finish of life.

It is figure I like – for probably the most half – and select to do.

I’m not freaked out by the subject of demise.

I maintain house for others as they navigate the questions that may come up at finish of life

• Has my life had which means?
• Will my household be okay with out me?
• What occurs once I die?

In my life exterior of this work, I comply with my thoughts’s eye as a photographer – sometimes gradual journeys which can be each soothing and introspective.

Perhaps an antidote to the troubles I witness in my hospice work.

Two years in the past, my mother was dying.

I used to be in a position to spend time slowing down together with her at bedside throughout her ultimate weeks.

I marveled at – if not envied – the consolation she present in her religion and within the rituals she carried together with her from her years of churchgoing.

She was virtually euphoric within the days earlier than she died.

And from this expertise of loss and love, fairly actually out of the ashes, this mission arose.

Dead Reckoning is an exploration of areas that supply solace within the face of demise nervousness – whether or not indoors or outdoor.

These pictures are a mixture of seemingly contradictory settings that share a standard factor – the presence and play of sunshine, which suggests a “greater” presence past the one we see and know on this world.

This mission has been simpler for me to develop in a visible language than in a spoken or written one.

Talking about “faith”, “life everlasting”, non secular and non secular beliefs will be uncomfortable, whereas I discover speaking about demise “easy” compared.

Interestingly, my work in hospice is usually speaking.

My work as a photographer is about seeing. In silence.

Is there a particular picture that’s your favourite or significantly significant to this sequence?

Interestingly, the picture that was most significant, that launched this mission didn’t stay part of it:  a picture of a gap dug within the floor on the graveyard – patiently awaiting my mom’s cremains.
My favourite picture inside the sequence, “November 8″, is an area inside a hospital’s basement chapel, the place non secular prayer books relaxation in opposition to a wall, greeting guests upon entry into the house.

Can you inform us about your inventive follow?

I journal. I let the concepts of the mission carry me and my digicam out into the world. After taking pictures, I often wait a number of days or every week to take a look at and course of my digital pictures. I discover my thoughts is both in taking pictures or modifying mode and barely holds each of these areas on the similar time with ease.

What’s subsequent for you?

I’m relishing a pinhole digicam mission that honors as soon as acquainted, now more and more outdated areas, objects and experiences from my earlier life – from the payphones I performed in with mates making occasional prank calls to my first-ever, albeit hand-me-down, typewriter to the neighborhood diners and drive-in film theaters I longed to go to.

As I settle into the second half of my life, detecting small adjustments in my physique – stability, handwriting, hair thinning, bra measurement, reminiscence, I sense a shift in my expertise of time passing: time appears to be dashing up. While I discover my consideration craves a deepening and a slowing-down, my photographer’s eye welcomes shock and uncertainty – a manner of working that has allowed me to create thirty totally different pinhole cameras to seize these touchstones of an earlier time and place.

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Epiphany Knedler is an interdisciplinary artist + educator exploring the methods we interact with historical past. She graduated from the University of South Dakota with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Political Science and accomplished her MFA in Studio Art at East Carolina University. She relies in Aberdeen, South Dakota, serving as an Assistant Professor of Art and Coordinator of the Art Department at Northern State University, a Content Editor with LENSCRATCH, and the co-founder and curator of the artwork collective Midwest Nice Art. Her work has been exhibited within the New York Times, the Guardian, Vermont Center for Photography, Lenscratch, Dek Unu Arts, and awarded via Lensculture, the Lucie Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, and Photolucida Critical Mass.
Follow Epiphany on Instagram: @epiphanysk