Calling the Birds Home by Cheryle St. Onge is an intimate and poetic work that intertwines memory, nature, and mourning. Born from the experience of her mother’s illness and loss, the project delicately explores the transformation of roles between mother and daughter and the search for signs of continuity in the shared landscape of their lives.
The project captures the relationship between the photographer and her mother on a farm in New England, showing presence and beauty even in the face of illness, in an exploration of layered memory.
St. Onge‘s images translate the rhythm of care and waiting into visual forms, capturing light, everyday details, and appearances of the natural world as traces of presence. The landscape thus becomes a place of dialogue: a space of absence and persistence, a terrain in which the artist continues to search for her mother.
The book moves between fragility and resilience, between the suspension of time and the desire for continuity. In her texts, St. Onge intensely recounts the experience of accompanying her mother through illness, until her death, and the processing of grief through the practice of photography. The photographs, like windows of light and silence, become a testimony of love, loss, and transformation.
Cheryle St. Onge, winner of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, lived with her mother for decades on the same farm in New Hampshire, sharing a life marked by a deep emotional bond and constant artistic collaboration.
When her mother (herself an artist) developed vascular dementia, her memory and emotions gradually began to fade, first interrupting their shared photographic work and then St. Onge’s own artistic practice.
In response to her mother’s sad desire to die, the artist resumed taking portraits—spontaneously, using whatever camera she had available—in an attempt to find light in the darkest afternoons.
These intimate images became acts of presence, small rituals of connection and care.
Although dementia erased their conversations, the portrait sessions remained deeply collaborative and quietly joyful.
With each photograph, St. Onge builds a tender exchange, a form of “emotional currency” in the face of loss.
Calling the Birds Home, published by L’Artiere with design by Teresa Piardi (Maxwell Studio), is a book that invites reflection on how images can preserve the bond with those who are no longer with us, transforming personal memory into a universal form of sharing.
Calling the Birds Home remains a silent and necessary gesture: a way to continue calling those who can no longer answer, knowing that perhaps the answer is not a voice, but a light, a detail, a fragment of the world that still vibrates.
In these images, mourning does not end, but transforms into attention, into listening, into a different presence. This is where photography ceases to be memory and becomes relationship: an act of love that continues, even when everything else seems to have stopped.
Editorial notes
Photographs: Cheryle St. Onge
Design: Teresa Piardi – Maxwell Studio
