Spark of a Nail

My lens-based practice unfolds across writing, observation, performance, archival strategies, and long-term collaboration to examine questions about the intersections of photography, labor, gender, memory, and landscape. Recurring throughout my work is an engagement with environments in flux and inherited visual narratives, real and imagined landscapes, where the personal intersects with broader political and cultural structures.

This approach is exemplified in my most recent series “Spark of a Nail,” an ongoing photographic collaboration with women and non-binary individuals working and training in the building trades, a historically male-dominated field. The project combines documentary, staged photography, and performance strategies to create a distinct visual language that depicts a choreography of tradespeoples’ bodies shaping and transforming space of their own volition. These photographs are interwoven with moments of rest, collective action, and vulnerability, scenes that are seen infrequently within dominant historical representations of labor. Using staging and performance, I construct images that respond to omissions in the photographic record.

I collaborate with tradespeople working as carpenters, glaziers, painters, and electricians across the United States with varying levels of experience, often photographing students in programs designed to support women and non-binary individuals entering the trades, as well as individuals working one-on-one in spaces where they can articulate and demonstrate their expertise. These learning environments offer rare moments of openness and vulnerability within construction culture. Through deliberate framing and compositional strategies, my pictures imagine a speculative world populated almost exclusively by women and non-binary people engaged in collective acts of building.

“Spark of a Nail” is in conversation with two distinct visual histories: 20th century images of labor in the U.S., which largely omitted minority groups and often served propagandistic goals–and feminist photographic practices from the 1970s and 80s including those by Meadow Muska, Betty Medsger and the various photographers included in "The Women’s Carpentry Book," published in 1980, which too has its own omissions. It was in this era that women first started working in the building trades and were met with extreme hostility. While these jobs are safer today than when women first entered the trades they are still perceived as threats, both economically and because they undermine the perception of this work as inherently masculine. As such, threats of sexual violence, racism and sexism persist, making the act of recording women and non-binary people in these spaces not just the work of archives but a continued, relevant, and necessary gesture. 

Amidst a hostile political landscape in the U.S. for women and the LGBTQ+ community creating feminist images that gesture towards a future that differs from the current reality is a necessary photographic act. My photographs, what I call a “choreography of bodies, imagine a future in which old structures are dismantled and new ones are collectively built in their place.

Morgan Levy was selected from among the applicants for “Sisterhood in Practice” exhibition and is also part of »Guest Room: Whitney Hubbs & Jermaine Francis«.