TALKING PICTURES Erinn Springer

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Erinn Springer  is a photographer from Dunn County, Wisconsin. Finding subjects within her immediate family and extended community, her work explores memory and mortality through the lens of rural American life. Balancing social record and constructed narrative, Erinn’s still and moving images carry the tradition of documentary with a dreamlike approach. Her debut monograph Dormant Season was published in 2023 and was reviewed in​​ The New Yorker as an anthropological yet deeply intimate view of the midwest, honest and incandescent. Erinn’s work has been featured in and commissioned by publications and brands such as The New York Times, Die Zeit, Le Monde, NPR, Vogue, Loewe & others.

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Udaipur, Rajasthan, India (2018)

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I grew up in the country outside of a small town. My earliest interest in photography came from a desire to express, but also a desire to explore. I spent the first years out of college largely out of a suitcase (I’m still out of a suitcase, but then, even more so), traveling abroad on backpacking trips that led me to some of my first images and assignments.  I made this photograph in 2018 after waking up from a backseat nap on a road trip in Rajasthan. This was two years before I intentionally began photographing my family and I believe that this moment had a subconscious but significant effect on my desire to return home. It’s interesting to look through my early archive and see the undeniable interest in families and community even well before I was documenting my own.

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Colfax, Wisconsin, USA (2022)

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This image was made on the patio of my childhood home, a place that I had used as a court for basketball games, a stage for dance performances, and a canvas for chalk drawings. The chipped siding and cracks in the cement are like the wrinkles on my mother’s face. I remember the surfaces to be smooth, but as we’ve aged, our places have too.

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Cornucopia, Wisconsin, USA (2024)

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In the last couple of years, the work with my nuclear family has expanded to more of a familial look at the northern midwest region. Lake Superior has always had a special calling and for the first time this past summer, I joined a commercial fishing boat for their daily run. We began before sunrise and spent  five hours offshore in high intensity labour, hauling thousands of pounds of Whitefish. After the work was done, the crew ate their breakfast while persistent cormorants competed for their share of the catch.

 

Follow Erinn @springerinn 

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