"shadowland", a woman's right to choose, conceptual fine art photography ©2007 kelly angard

Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side is all correct, definite, orderly; the paths are straight, the trees regular, the sun shaded; escorted by  gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergymen, she has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave and no one will touch  a hair on her head. But on the other side is all confusion. Nothing follows a regular course…
- from the essay, Harriette Wilson; by Virginia Woolfe

"ms. understood", conceptual fine art photography ©2006 kelly angard

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood…”

I’ve found myself contemplating the many aspects and problems of communication lately, both verbal and written. Communication is the main artery in which we connect with another human being; it is innate…and ironically, this thing we desire, we also fear the most.

To speak and be spoken to…to hear and be heard. The latter is so much harder to do…

"almost ready", fine art photography ©2006 kelly angard

One must always have one’s boots on and be ready to go.
- Michel de Montaigne

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when i am dead. I believe in such cartography, to be marked by nature. Not just to label ourselves like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communial books, communial histories. All that I wished was to walk upon an earth that had no maps.

- from “The English Patient”

…prints & licensing available

"wild at heart", boy imagination and wild nature ©2009 kelly angard

“inside all of us is a wild thing…”
— Where the Wild Things Are

the life of an invisible woman, conceptual photography ©2009 kelly angard

I am the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible…
– Elizabeth Wurtzel

...prints and licensing available

"sheer light" © 2008 kelly angard

I feel it now: there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it…
- Rainer Maria Rilke