Photography of Kaitlin Maxwell by Tim Maul

Late last summer long before this issue was in the planning stages I impulsively photographed my outstretched left hand with my iPhone several yards away from the room I learned to read in. Having ‘time on my hands’ I confirmed my existence by mapping a fuzzy topography concluding in five worn peninsulas and a thin scar from an 8th grade altercation. We require our hands and fingers more than I imagined we would in this futuristic world where they text, type, and tap screens along with all the sensory fun stuff. A museum devoted to the ‘Hand in Art’ would be vast and one need only to search out the ancient ‘Cueva de las Manos’ (‘Cave of Hands’) in the province of Santa Cruz Argentina for the wondrous, and maybe even pleasurable origins in replicating, here by accurate stenciling, the indexical beauty of the human hand.

In choosing to photograph her family Kaitlin Maxwell steps in and out of the lives (and clothing) of a formidable matriarchy of exceptional women who own every image they're in. I remain intrigued by the social dynamics in photography differentiated between the observant family member and the embedded outsider who often exploits or tweaks perceived anxieties towards the production of narrative, what portraitists have done for centuries. Often the initial agreement to be photographed recedes as a group adjusts to the person with a camera. I am no longer sure if ‘trust’ plays the role it once did in today's image world but clearly Maxwell is granted it through her unflinching images that move between brilliant daylight and interior shadow. Her blurring of the generations by wearing her Grandmother's clothing and costume interrogates her own link in this chain of inheritance by literally ‘stepping into someone else's shoes’, overlapping the written past with the unwritten future.

When visiting Maxwell's website I recommend scrolling through her ‘Hands’ series as encountering them in this context provides a form of