Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Jennifer Garza-Cuen was born in America’s Pacific Northwest and lived for many years as an expatriate in Mexico, Europe, Egypt and the United Kingdom. She received her bachelors degree from the American University in Cairo, and her MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Garza-Cuen’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and published in contemporary photographic journals such as Blink and The Photo Review. Selected residencies include The Vermont Studio Center and Oxbow. Today we share Jennifer’s series titled Eden, VT.

Eden, VT

Working in a constructed-documentary style, Jennifer Garza-Cuen explores place as a residue of our cultural memory, an inheritance. Engaging ideas of place as something claimed by a wanderer, with loose or fictitious ties to towns and cities across the country.

It was a great aunt on her father’s side whose people settled in Eden. Located in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Eden appears a quiet community of Adventists, Mennonites and Quakers, where dairy farmers, mill workers and craftsmen gather at the general stores, dinners are served in old wooden churches and dances are held at the local Grange Hall. The rivers of Eden all spring from Eden and the views are as ravishing as the garden from which it takes its name. But it is also a hard and rugged place, where resourceful and independent inhabitants still labor stoically, as their ancestors before them.

To view more of Jennifer’s work please visit his website.