Now You See Me – ArtDesk

SEPTEMBER DAWN BOTTOMS carries her camera like a talisman. Ever since the thirty-year-old photographer began making images after moving from rural Oklahoma to Los Angeles with her mom and sister in 2016, Bottoms’ self-taught practice has offered a protective sheath to help navigate her family’s painful past and chart a better future.

“It gave me a reason to ask questions I would have never asked,” Bottoms says. “The first time I told my mom I was molested as a child, I had my camera out and I made her photograph me while I told her. Then I photographed her response, and it just made me feel more safe.”

Newly emboldened with a creative license, which has since landed her a 2020 New York Times Fellowship and freelance assignments with marquee publications like NPR, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, Bottoms began focusing her unflinching work on unpacking intergenerational trauma—including her own.

But her camera captures more than pain, and it hasn’t taken long for the world to start paying attention. Bottoms’ spellbinding images of red-state gay bars, small-town marching bands, persevering women, and national political leaders (including the president of the United States) have landed the emerging photographer on lists like Time’s Best Photojournalism of 2020, BuzzFeed’s “15 Photographers That You Should Follow Immediately” and Artsy’s 20 “Rising Female Photojournalists.”

While these early successes began with a spark lit by the artist’s life on the West Coast, it’s Bottoms’ home in Oklahoma that keeps her creative flame burning. From street-level scenes in her current home of Tulsa to her depictions of the resiliency of the historically all-Black town of Boley—located about five miles from where she grew up in the town of Paden—the artist says there’s a magnetic force of belonging in Oklahoma that steadies her wandering eye.

“When I come back, despite everything that’s happened, it feels like mine. It feels like I am a part of that world. It feels like I belong there—and I’ve never felt that way,” she says. “I’ve had all these opportunities to leave and not come back. I’ve worked for the New York Freaking Times, but I left to come back to Oklahoma, because something isn’t finished here.”

Part of that unfinished business lies within herself and the lineage of pain explored in personal works like Bottoms’ ongoing series, Not As Saved As We’d Like To Be. The multimedia project examines the ripple effects of sexual trauma and mental illness through the artist’s relationship to her mother and siblings, by way of a self-described “collaborative documentary process.”

Bottoms says photography, which she threw herself into fully as an adult during the lowest point in her own mental-health struggles, helped steel her nerves against the fear of applying pressure to those family bruises. She says it also gave her the confidence to ask tough questions—and get tough answers.

“A lot of the time I don’t feel validated in talking about these things. I think, ‘Oh, it wasn’t as bad as what my mom experienced,’ or ‘It wasn’t as bad as what my brother experienced,’” she says. “But having the camera gives me this validation I hadn’t really gotten before, and lets me explore these questions in a safe way. If I didn’t have a camera, I would have given up. I would have been scared. I would have been intimidated.”

More than simply providing an insulating layer for probing difficult subjects, Bottoms says, her photography practice has given her the ability to zoom out past the hurt, bringing the artist closer to a clearer image of the fallible, wounded people refracted in her lens.

“When I’m looking at my mom through the camera, it’s easier for me to see her as just a person—not just as my mother, but as a person with faults. I don’t need her to be this superhero,” she says. “I can be so angry at her, but then I lift the camera up.”

Three works by September Dawn Bottoms will appear in Destination Oklahoma at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, on display through October 17, 2022. oklahomacontemporary.org