About Me
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| Elisabeth Sunday |
Through my work as a fine art photographer, I’ve been in conversation with indigenous communities from around the world. In Africa and elsewhere, I was taught to see nature as an integrated, living system that connects everything and everyone. Native people have understood this for countless generations. Their stories, wisdom, and teachings influence each one of my images. With the use of my specially designed mirrors and lenses, my photographs transcend the traditional straight image and expose our hidden connections to Nature and spirit. I use through the archetype of the elongated form to join heaven and earth. I call this technique, Field Mirror Photography.
As an artist and storyteller, I create photographs to inspire and illustrate our interconnected relationship to nature. This new series will employ some of my earlier visual techniques, but also include some new ones. As a body of work, Spirits Rising: extinction, will help to raise awareness, and inspire people to be part of the change needed to save our planet. Some things are better communicated through the arts. After all, a picture can be worth a thousand words.
As a fine art photographer, and 3rd generation artist in my family, my techniques in photography are inspired by indigenous art and especially African-American story-telling that were part of my life growing up. My paternal grandmother, who was both Chickasaw and Black, was a professional story-teller and elocutionist. My white maternal grandfather was a well known American painter from the Cleveland School. He traveled to Africa in the 1920s to paint, film, and photograph. His artwork, and vivid stories of his journey greatly influenced me. These influences helped to shape a visual narrative that makes my work rich in meaning and metaphor. As a person of multi-cultural heritage, with over 40 years experience in the field learning from tribal elders, I’ve come to understand the meaning of, ‘the consciousness of nature.’
My background and years long work with first peoples from around the world, make me uniquely qualified to create this series. I am a good listener; experienced story-teller, and qualified artist. I know how to synthesize information to create visual narratives with meaning, message, power, and compositional integrity. This is my work.
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| “The Listening into the Dreaming” 2002, Yap Atoll, Micronesia 40" x 30" archival pigment print |
“In order to understand who you are
and where you come from,
you have to listen into the Natural World.”
I first became fascinated with Native wisdom as a child and always dreamed of meeting the world’s first peoples in person when I got older. In the mid-1970s while I was still in high school and later in college, I photographed Native Americans on their lands, and recorded their personal histories in effort to understand my own heritage and broaden my understanding of the spiritual mysteries. With funding from individuals sponsors, along with the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, the Foundation FRAC, and Eastman Kodak Company, I began photographing remote animist tribes between 1986 through 2012. With continued financial support from individuals sponsors, (Quincy Jones, Graham Nash, and Bonnie Raitt to name a few), I traveled the world to photograph indigenous peoples mainly in Africa, but also in Southeast Asia, Micronesia, and Australia.
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| Opening the Heart, (c) 1995 Balinese Priestess, Indonesia 24" x 20" gold toned silver gelatin print |
In Southeast Asia, I photographed Animist-Hindu and Animist-Buddhist mystics and healers from India, Thailand and Bali. In this series, I photographed people engaged in spiritual practice, such as prayer and meditation. I asked the spiritual elders to provide a personal message that would accompany their photograph.
During that same period, I traveled to Australia, where I met Aboriginal elders who brought me to experience the dreamtime out on a far escarpment. These are power-spots that connect people to a timeless realm. These places are said to hold immense power and allow a person to communicate and even study with beings who lived thousands of years prior, or who had not yet been born. During my time in the Australian outback, an aboriginal elder warned the dreaming could disappear. I was told:
“Because of uranium mining and contamination, the spirits are rising and leaving the land, the dreamtime will be gone. Now we have become sick, because the earth is sick.”
A few years later I traveled to meet animist pacific islanders who lived on remote atolls in Micronesia. It was on Yap Atoll during a conversation about water spirits where an elder warned:
“The spirits are leaving the water. Without them, we won’t know how to heal ourselves,…the reef is dying."
I understood from the islanders, the reef was their mother, and without her, they too would die. The Aborigines believe their bodies are made from the earth, and therefore feel the earth’s troubles within their own bodies. As we poison the soils, the spirits leave and the ground itself becomes dead— devoid of all life. This is what I mean by spirits rising, extinction.
Tribal and indigenous people who live with the natural world, listen closely, and observe. This much is clear: With respect to the animals, plants, oceans and land, we are living in an environmental state of emergency.
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| Guardian, Eye Woman and Child The Ituri Rain Forest, Zaire, (c) 1989 40" x 30" gold toned silver gelatin print |
The photograph, “Guardian, Ituri Rain Forest, 1989” (left), is of an Efe (Pygmy) woman and child. They are hunter-gatherers. It is believed that the Efe have lived in the Ituri of the Congo Basin, located in the heart of Africa for at least 25,000 years. The Efe people believe the forest is their, ‘mother; father, brother, sister, lover, and friend.’ With the use of my field mirror, I was able to combine human form with that of the forest, in order to demonstrate our interconnectedness to the world of nature.
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