EXHIBITION DETAILS
Right Now This Is The Way It Is | Noelle Swan Gilbert
2013
STATEMENT
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t photograph the world around me. My first forays with a camera were exploring my neighbor’s private garden, a tranquil French rose garden, discretely concealed behind looming stone walls; all the roses neatly boxed in and lined up, with perfectly manicured walkways of soft grey pebbles. As I walked along the paths wearing hard soled saddle shoes, every crunch, crunch, crunch that might have gone unnoticed in the outside world was the only thing audible in the stillness of the garden. I went after school to photograph flowers and to escape the chaos of my boxed in teenage life next door, and in the process I learned to see in black and white and to dream in color.
Years later, a lifetime away from those afternoons in my neighbor’s garden, I am now the mother of two teenage girls, and much like own their mother they are contemplative and curious. With each year, time seems to accelerate at lightening speed, as if gathering momentum to catapult them out of the house long before I am ready to live without them. Even though they are content in place right now, they too feel the magnetic pull to move out of the box of childhood. As the future encroaches into their present, they hear life whispering, tempting them to grow up, right now.
This series documents the world that my daughters and their friends inhabit, the quiet, intimate, everyday moments in a teenagers life. I want to capture it before it is gone because it’s a world where black and white dreams turn into color and it only happens once. This is the world we know, and right now, this is the way it is.
