Cancelled: Book talk and signing, with CAA Member Kristen Joy Emack

Cancelled: Book Talk and Signing, with CAA Member Kristen Joy Emack

Join CAA for a book talk and signing of C O U S I N S: Photobook with CAA Member Kristen Joy Emack! Refreshments will be provided.

About | Kristen Joy Emack’s Cousins explores what it means to be a young girl among young girls. In one photograph, three girls sit atop the ruffled covers of a bed pushed up against a wood-paneled wall. At center and slightly forward one girl appears upset and gazes downward beyond the frame. A light shining on a second girl at right echoes the impression that she has an idea; she turns to the eldest girl, at left, in search of its confirmation. That girl looks forward toward the camera. Here, and throughout the series, Kristen captures the whimsicality of self-making. The girls look inward at their own bond, sometimes searching for who knows what to do, who to share in a laugh, or who to leave be. We see affirmation, challenge, and ambivalence. In the quiet intimacy of cousins we see thoughts, moods, and feelings unspoken but understood. 

Kristen is photographing her family, but these are not traditional family pictures. A mother and an aunt, Kristen is also an artist and thus through the act of photographing the girls, they grow up being recognized by a loving adult as works of art. There is a profound messaging that occurs through the creation of this body of work: all of their introspections, interactions, experiences, idiosyncrasies, emotions, and evolutions matter. It is powerful for these young, Black, girls to be seen and loved so fully—and to see and love themselves.

Kristen Joy Emack | Kristen Joy Emack is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Saint Botolph Fellow and a Massachusetts Cultural Arts Fellow. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, in galleries and photo festivals, and has been published in magazines including Vogue Italia, Nat Geo, OATH, The Horn Book and The Sun. She has lectured at multiple universities including Harvard, Hofstra and Boston University and her work is in multiple private collections and institutions in the US and Europe. Kristen has recently released her first monograph called Cousins, published by L’ARTIERE in Italy. Kristen is also a public school educator who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is represented by Gallery Kayafas.