THOSE BEFORE, 2022

Haley Sessoms is a lens-based artist from Roanoke, Virginia. Her work is inspired by notions of home, memory, and opacity in response to the natural world. She explores these themes through film, writing, painting, and textiles. In October 2023, she began a series of photographs related to her family and hometown. These images are inspired by the complex dynamics within familial relationships, especially for the artist as a biracial woman, sister, daughter, and aunt. She hopes this collaboration with her family expands and continues as a project where the camera communicates the conversations we might want to avoid with the people we love. “Growing up, my family was very close. My brother was my best friend. Our identities are tightly inter- twined like a pinky promise. We’d stay at our grand- mother’s on the weekends, playing pretend and building forts in the den. I still hear cicadas in our backyard, but I wonder where the lightning bugs went. Maybe they’re rooted in our memories, beneath the grass, where we’d run barefoot. Domesticity brushes against the ever-shifting landscape of memory and identity. Suspended between past and present, old family photographs reveal, in between the black and white, memories we’ve forgotten and ancestral history before us. I photograph my father and his mother, while my mother photographs me. They make up everything I am, from the curls that knot in my hair to the gap in my teeth. As an initial investigation of self, this ongoing series emerges as a family portrait, binding us to one another, offering certainty and wonder, and answering the questions we avoid. These images are not solely mine.”