Sadie Cook is from North Carolina, and will graduate from Yale with a BA in photography this May. Sadie is usually a sarcastic person, and she feels uncomfortable talking about photography. She talks about her pictures with so much earnestness that she always ends up blushing.
Sadie makes anxious pictures around touch and delicacy and her own discomfort with her body. Her photographs are diaristic and taken daily, but resequenced obsessively. Photographing makes Sadie very aware of her own body. While shooting, she feels very vulnerable and very powerful–like a thing with no skin and big claws. She works in book form and her work has been published and shown nationally and internationally.
My Breath
On August 27, between 3:04 and 7:15 pm, I bent over a desk in the computer lab, scanning my breath. I want to hold onto my body. I want to understand all its sides and parts. I bound the breaths into a book, interlacing the scans with photographs–sequences of my body, other bodies, people I care about, strangers and strange things. I think about language a lot.
To me, pictures on breath feels like a definition of speech. That’s what I want my photographs to be. I want looking at these photographs to feel like an acquaintance has stopped me on the street to say hi and asks how I’m doing, and I take a deep breath and I say everything I’m really, actually feeling and thinking, with all the stammers and stutters and half-said sentences.
To view more of Sadie Cook’s work please visit her website.