Once in a while, I’ll encounter photographs that scratch or even scar me, embedding themselves into the same subconscious archive that catalogs and buries trauma. I can’t eliminate them; they resurface at the strangest times. Whenever my daughter’s bath water gets too cold, or I’m standing over a tub from a particular vantage point, a latent image of Nan Goldin’s Ryan in the Tub flashes behind my eyes. It’s not only work that is overtly heavy, dark, or trauma-driven. It’s quieter, more insidious—forcing a type of unsolicited introspection. Another that comes to mind is Hatleberg’s girl standing with flowers (Lost Coast, TBW). When it happens, my stomach sinks like I’m getting sick. I could dissect this phenomenon and tie it to experiences I’ve endured or the fact that I have a daughter, but the truth is, I don’t care to understand fully.
I had this reaction when I first encountered Dylan Hausthor’s work in Sleep Creek (Void, with Pia Guilmoth). The images were uncanny and haunting, not because of their subject matter but because of the intangible dread they carried—something unknown and sinister. The work felt wild and untamed, running in all directions, disregarding any preconceived notions of what photography should do. In Hausthor’s debut title, What the Rain Might Bring (TBW), they continue to push down this path independently but with a more exact and refined approach. The work was made over an extended period, during which Hausthor lived in various religious communities, and features large-format, black-and-white images saturated with tension and ambiguity.
Hausthor Statement
“What The Rain Might Bring is a cross-disciplinary project that explores the complexities of storytelling, faith, folklore, and the inherent queerness of the natural world…
The often disregarded underbelly of a post-fact world seems to be the simultaneous beauty and danger of fiction. I’m interested in image-making as a process of hybridity—weavings of myth filled with tangents and nuances, treading the lines between investigative journalism, disinformation, performance, acts of obsession, and self-conscious manipulation…
By using modes of making that are traditionally linked to fact-finding, I hope for the viewers and readers of my work to find themselves in a space between fiction and reality—to push past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.” (DH)
One of the most notable departures from Sleep Creek is Dylan’s expanded use of various modes of image-making. What the Rain May Bring blends together staged, performed, candid, found, photojournalistic, and seemingly manipulated imagery. Initially, this bothered me, as some images felt staged in a way I hadn’t seen from them until now—the woman lying on a mattress surrounded by candles or the man standing awkwardly covered in mud. It’s not to say they aren’t working, but they felt more considered and polished—only existing to be photographed. Sleep Creek seemed to hide any staging or manipulation, if there was any. The photographs felt loose and imperfect, creating a facade of authenticity or some illusion of truth, which, for me, was critical to maintaining the unease and tension the work upheld. Once I abandoned my attachment to these ideals and put prior expectations (my bullshit) aside, the work revealed itself. The disconnect I was experiencing was a core element to the work, to be stuck between fact and fiction, or the real and the imagined.
On the surface, it would be easy to consider a type of rural wilderness as a critical piece to the work; however, the places Hausthor builds are more liminal, separated from but not entirely detached from reality or a physical locale. Dylan’s use of a highly confrontational flash is a defining visual characteristic that allows for this. The light isolates its subject, illuminating what it touches while the rest falls into a deep black void – stripping away all surrounding context. In FLASH!, Kate Flint writes about these dark spaces, describing flash’s ability to “carry overtones of silence and mystery, concealment and threat, or the dread of a narrative that may unfold, may explode.” The flash locates the photographer’s position and stages a confrontation with their subject, brief invasions of light suspended from a wall of darkness, the unknown. Midway through and behind one of the delicate gatefolds, an image surfaces of a canoe tipping over. A subject, held in limbo by the flash’s strike, is shown in the absolute last moment before being subsumed into total darkness, suspended between visibility and disappearance, between life and death in an environment that is placeless, nowhere.
What the Rain May Bring is undeniably personal and describes something intangible and unknowable with exacting precision. The work in total is akin to a convoluted fever dream with an outcome of an ineffable sentiment, nothing that resembles a resolution. Dylan has extreme awareness of themselves and their process; however, I’m sure a part of this work remains a mystery to them, too. Not all questions need answers; leaving parts of a process unknown is a decision, and regarding this work, a critical one.
While driving with my daughter the other day, the sun was setting, and I experienced a rare moment of pure contentment. A cliché thought, “If this were my last day alive, I’d feel lucky,’ or however the saying goes. That thought immediately turned dark: “But what would her life be like without me?” I went down the tunnel and imagined it all: the funeral, her growing old. Returning to the present, I turned to look at her; she was drawing with her spit-covered finger on the window. I shook my head and laughed. This was a microcosm for everything, however insignificant: Life is great, it sucks, it’s decent, it’s terrible, and suddenly you’re laughing. So…gut-wrenching portraits, psychological landscapes, birth and death, fish falling from the sky, multiplying mushrooms and boobs on a tree? — Yeah, I get it. I know better than to think Dylan intended to do so, but if any photo work had a chance at reflecting the uncertain, shit-show mess of our current climate or ‘reality,’ it would look like What the Rain Might Bring.
