Flowers Drink the River — Pia-Paulina Guilmoth. Published by Stanley Barker Books.
I could spend hours looking at every single photograph by Pia Pauline Guilmoth. Her new monograph, Flowers Drink The River, is full of cathartic, gothy, and richly constructed images – a beautiful love letter to her two-year gender transition. Spiderwebs stretch over delicate flowers; a white horse sits quietly as a house burns behind it; a moonlit snake wraps itself around a tree branch with its tongue out – consistent symbols of rebirth and uncharted possibility. While many photos are elaborately staged – to get one photo, Guilmoth sat in the woods for hours, holding a tray of crushed apples to attract and build trust with local deer before photographing them with a flash – there is no digital manipulation or AI. It's refreshing to see such precision, grace, sensitivity, and immaculate metaphor.
Jon Feinstein is a Seattle and NYC-based curator, photographer, writer, and co-founder of Humble Arts Foundation. Over the past 15+ years, Jon’s curatorial collaborations have included Photoville, Blue Sky Gallery, The Ogden Museum and PhotoNola, Photographic Center Northwest, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, and Barclays Arena in Brooklyn, NY for ArtBridge. He is a recipient of the 2019 BlueSky Curatorial Prize and the 2021 Peter S. Reed Photography Grant. His writing has appeared in VICE, Aperture, The Adobe Blog, TIME, Photograph, Hyperallergic, The Stranger, and Lenscratch.