Lara Shipley is not a documentary photographer.
Although her portraits capture deeply personal moments—gnawing hesitations, defiant glares, glances subtler than the brush of a butterfly wing—they’re most attuned to the power of place, memory, and myth.
Storyteller is perhaps a better term for Shipley, whose photographs hum in an electrified space between sober reality and terrifying tall tale. It’s a style that shimmers with transient magic—and a style that justly earned her a place in the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ “Women to Watch” exhibition in 2015.
Much of Shipley’s work centers on economically depressed communities and the residents who choose to stay. In “The Devil’s Promenade,” a series of photographs taken in the Ozarks, she draws on regional folklore, training her camera on the sites of mysterious happenings. But in the process, she captures an unspoken tension between the wild growth of the rural Missouri landscape and the withering opportunities for its human inhabitants.
That tension pulses through Young Mennonites. The image suggests a halting intimacy between the couple in the foreground: their bodies bend toward each other like sun-starved seedlings even as the woman reaches behind her, clinging hesitantly to another anchor. Cloud-faded colors dress the scene in the palette of folklore, transforming the muddy water to baptismal font. Ripples spark through the water’s surface like radio static. And chubby vegetation looms over their thin bodies with the implied energy of a prelude, a held breath.
In the absence of human figures, Shipley’s photographs are no less intimate. Some of her most expressive images engage the myth of the spook light, a mysterious orb of light said to appear along the Devil’s Promenade, a rural Missouri road, at night.
False Lights denies that myth legitimacy in its very title—but the photograph nonetheless captures a chilling, stark-white sunburst in a sinister, night-blackened thicket of vegetation. Unchecked growth sweeps across the frame like an errant stage curtain, crowding out the source of the light. The image piques our curiosity as it frustrates our desire for more. The organic threatens to choke the imagination.
Filtered through Shipley’s lens, the spook light isn’t some supernatural Svengali. Its power lies instead in its ability to illuminate the Ozarks with dazzling strangeness. In False Lights, it’s the contours and crags of a tree—not the spook light itself—that leer ominously out of the dark, jutting toward us with uncanny crispness.
One portrait, When the Baby Came He Built Them a House, positions its figure playfully—a faint smile hangs on the man’s lips as he holds a brow-furrowed infant up for display. A grimy, pock-marked foam target (and holey Pabst can) might seem like a somber backdrop, but Shipley lets it spring in from the corner like a grinning, inanimate photobomb.
It’s a complication that seems characteristic of Shipley, who rejects the notion that photographs can capture some immutable essence of person or place. Instead, her photographs serve as emotional and ephemeral artifacts, feeling out the corners of one particular moment or interaction while hinting seductively at the snake pit of stories coiled beneath.
– Liz Cook