anne saint-pierre

At summer solstice, the sun appears to rise and set in alignment with the East-West streets of New York City, a marvel called the Stonehenge effect, prompting primal feelings of adoration for the light. Almost every year since 2019 in a Washington Heights playground, I photograph kids engaged in meditative play with water, precisely at the time when rays of orange light transform the scene into a spell-binding shadow theater.

Asking families in a few words of Spanish if I can photograph their children, and telling those, “Please don’t mind me”, shooting against the sun by feeling only, I find images to become more and more abstract over the years, as if children and teens through their dance eluded representation, sliding instead behind the mirror of water.