In Focus: "The Haunted – Contemporary Photography Conjured in New England" by SPEEDWELL Contemporary and “Dead Trees Speak to Me” by Tabitha Barnard

The latest finds from our community artists’ photobooks

“In Focus” is a series of reviews in which we hunt down and peruse our favourite publications off the shelves of our community artists. This month, we are taking a closer look at "The Haunted – Contemporary Photography Conjured in New England," published by SPEEDWELL Contemporary and shared with us by its editor and one of the artists featured in the book, Jocelyn Lee. Tabitha Barnard, one of the artists included in this anthology, also shared with us her monograph “Dead Trees Speak to Me,” published by Wychelm Press.

Before opening the royal purple cover of "The Haunted," I Googled which states make up New England. I had gaped at Jocelyn Lee’s work more than once at Paris Photo, but holding this book in my hands, inscribed and mailed across a continent, felt different. The 152-page volume pairs 59 photographs with 11 poems, situating contemporary image-making within a literary lineage steeped in lyricism, confession, fear, and mysticism.

The poems by Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Robert Frost, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are not ornamental additions. They create a steady undertow. I appreciated that the photographers are not credited directly beneath their images. In an anthology, bylines can rupture immersion. Recognition unfolds gradually, and even when I identified a singular artist’s voice, the sequencing felt cohesive.

Moving through the book, I felt an eerie cold wind, the kind that marks seasonal change and sharpens attention. As Longfellow writes of ghosts and “the dark abyss” of night, thoughts of New England’s witch trials and Puritan paranoia surface. These histories are explicitly referenced in the framing of the book and resonate uncomfortably with the current political climate in the United States. Religious extremism is again being wielded under the guise of Christianity, shaping legislation and narrowing definitions of morality. In that context, the haunted landscape feels immediate rather than archival.

Photography itself carries a haunted history. In the 19th century, spirit photography used techniques such as double exposure to conjure ghosts beside the living. William H. Mumler’s images, including the photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, offered grieving families what appeared to be proof of continued presence in the wake of the Civil War’s mass death. These practices were eventually exposed as manipulations, yet they reveal how deeply the medium has been tied to belief and longing. "The Haunted" acknowledges that lineage and positions photography as self-aware, rooted in ectoplasm, staged apparitions, and the persistent desire to render the invisible visible.

There is also a sustained focus on women’s interior worlds. Mirroring SPEEDWELL Contemporary’s commitment to women and queer artists, the so-called feminine shapes the anthology. Hidden figures dissolve into foliage or are swallowed by the landscape. Female madness appears as a descent that carries agency rather than stigma. When Anne Sexton’s words appear, I am pulled back to my teenage years, obsessively reading her poems, underlining passages, carrying them like private scripture. Her articulation of breakdown as a form of clarity shaped me early. That intensity flickers here. The book gestures toward dancing under a full moon, but also toward acknowledging those who were pushed to the margins before us.

At times, the reliance on black and white photography to evoke unease feels predictable. The debate over whether color and black and white can coexist is ultimately uninteresting. What matters is whether the image holds. Smith Galtney’s photograph of snow marked by blood and fur disrupts any singular tonal register. Caleb Charland’s chandelier threaded through an apple tree initially reads as folklore made visible. Learning that the apples powered the light and that the exposure remained open throughout the night complicates the image further, balancing myth, science, and endurance. The motif of the apple recurs throughout the book. Long associated with American abundance and identity, the orchard here becomes a site of transmission. Charland’s chandelier, fed by apples and electric cables, suggests myth moving through circuitry.

Tad Beck’s "Palimpsest" series extends that idea of transmission across time. By restaging poses from Thomas Eakins’ circle and inserting contemporary models into archival images, Beck fractures historical continuity and reopens queer narratives once hidden. The reframing and re-photographing foreground the artist’s intervention. This is the kind of photography that interests me most, where the construction is visible and deliberate.

In the back of "The Haunted," first-person accounts from each artist provide context that the images withhold. Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s text reads like a diary entry and concludes with the assertion that even when healthcare, housing, and safety are stripped away, the ability to find beauty cannot be taken. The camera may not always witness that beauty, but the impulse to explore and imagine persists.

It was through these statements that I first encountered Tabitha Barnard. Her monograph "Dead Trees Speak to Me" gathers a decade of work shaped by her upbringing as the oldest of four sisters in rural Maine. If "The Haunted" maps a regional sensibility, Barnard constructs an intimate mythology. Working in analog color photography and exploring femininity, religion, and ritual, she stages images that feel like a Bible camp fever dream tipping into something darker. A hand presses against a pew. A Bible rests in its holder, just out of grasp. A close-up of a tooth pushing through fleshy pink gum tissue exposes the vulnerability of muliebrity. Red shoes lifted by pale legs against a forest feel enchanted and threatening.

Religious symbolism carries weight here. The biblical ritual of applying blood to the right thumb during consecration lingers in the imagery. In a moment when religion again shapes public life in restrictive ways, these gestures feel pointed. Barnard inhabits religious language and bends it, reclaiming its symbols rather than abandoning them. In her statement, she recalls childhood folktales and woods transformed into towers and witches’ huts. As adults, she and her sisters return to these sites to test whether the magic remains. The book weaves sisterhood, isolation, blood, and desire into a narrative that embraces descent without apology.

Both books engage photography’s long-standing entanglement with belief and myth, yet neither romanticizes it. The haunted landscape and the haunted body are treated as lived conditions shaped by history, religion, gender, and power. In "The Haunted," poetry and Puritan legacy frame contemporary images. In "Dead Trees Speak to Me," the forest becomes a private archive shaped by four sisters who refused inherited moral boundaries. Photography here does not attempt to prove the existence of ghosts. It demonstrates persistence. Landscape, body, ritual, and staging remain sites where artists test what can be reclaimed or reconfigured within the political and cultural climates they inhabit. That sustained engagement gives both books their force.

To further explore our community photobooks click here.We recommend diving into our archive to discover more projects centered on "haunted" landscapes, spiritual photography, and the reclamation of queer and feminine narratives. Alessandro Silverj’s Artist Feature on his project “Presence” a "fluid record of the patriarchal (il)legibility of women’s histories of persecution. For those drawn to the "fever dream" of ritual and the feminine, Elena Helfrecht’s Artist Blog offers a haunting parallel of folklore and psychological descent, where the landscape becomes a mirror for internal legacies. Similarly, Stella McGarvey’s “Lacunary” is deeply rooted in ‘hauntology’ – the idea of the presence of an absence.