Samantha Jensen weaves a powerful dialogue between climate change and chronic illness

During her studies, the photographer Samantha Jensen created a series about mothers and daughters in her local Brooklyn neighbourhood. When she eventually stood in front of the photos, pinned up to the wall to be presented to her art school class, a professor stopped her and asked about her own mother: “Wasn’t that what the underlying story was really about?”, they asked. This pause left room for a very important moment of reflection, and led to Samantha’s moving series, where flowers won’t, time will grow.

After the interaction, the artist set herself upon a new photographic venture; one timed with her return to her home of Northern California, and one that would document her mother’s resilience. “I’ve seen her battle with her diabetes and various autoimmune diseases throughout my life. I have seen her struggle with continuous low blood sugar, lost pregnancies, and the death of her son,” says Samantha. “I have also seen her swim, laugh, and dance with persistent joy. In my attempt to document my mother and the shape of her chronic illness, I recognised both a witness and a mirror in the Northern California landscape.”

This parallel found in both people and place – a physical testimony to the ongoing effects of climate change, and “the effects of illness on my mother’s physical body” – formed the backbone of the series, an ongoing photostory that speaks to the way the ecosystem of our bodies and our land are shaped by what is “ongoing and immedicable”. Samantha aims for the images throughout to open a window to things that many of us share an “unwillingness to look at”. A state of environmental disaster, or inside families’ impacted by chronic illness, the photos are a gateway to witness both “the broken and beautiful”, a tool to actively acknowledge our collective and personal pain — to see it as a sight for healing.

At the project’s start, Samatha visited specific places that held memories for her and her family, “never quite knowing exactly what I would find there”, she says. “The photographic process for me was one of exploration, finding new things and falling in love with the land and my family a second, and third and fourth time.” Placing intimate attention on her subjects, the photographer’s camera bridged two worlds: “burned roots of redwood trees, to my mother injecting insulin”. And, to unite moments distant but not so far apart, Samantha played with scale and vantage point “to blur imposed divisions between our own bodies and the natural world”. She explains: “In all aspects, I was interested in a close inspection. I think this closeness of my camera is a thread that ties all the works together.”

The photographer’s detailed compositions are cut up by naturally occurring lines – layers within trees, cracks in the ground, stone formations – that feel like they might go on forever, stretching out over several shots, weaving together loose threads from her childhood landscapes into personal memories and portraits of her family. “I am unable to separate the story of my family and my memories from the Northern California landscape and the natural world,” the photographer shares. “I am unable to look at my familial grief, love, and regrowth and not recognise it as nature – something I have witnessed the forests and the coasts do time and time again.”

Amidst the signs of hurt, collapse and degradation throughout the series, there’s a softness to the photographer’s lens. It allows us to notice the resilience we might find in nature, paralleled with the perseverance of her mother. Zooming in on things we might traditionally turn away from, Samantha has discovered “what emerges when we acknowledge and actively witness each other’s pain”. Her close inspection and willingness to witness things exactly as they are is a vehicle towards “intimacy, love, affirmation and resistance”, as she continues to capture “my mother's body and the land I grew up in responding to time, and the inevitable wreckage, reprieve, and rebuilding it offers us”, Samantha ends.