when people were bringing food and flowers to the house. A basket of fruit had been shoved under a guest bed and forgotten and was smelling bad. “I was like, ‘This feels like what I’m feeling right now.’ So, I took it to the studio and shot pictures of that. There are things like that in there responding to things that feel hard and painful. I took some portraits of my mom crying, and they weren’t staged or anything, but it just felt too direct. I’m trying to be less direct about it.” Over the past year, most of his assignments have been tough. Last August, a flash flood hit the town of Waverly, Tennessee, killing some 20 people, including 7-month-old twin boys. “I covered that funeral,” he says, “and that’s probably the toughest assignment I’ve ever had — trying to navigate how to cover this and also be extremely cautious and have an open line of communication with the family and let them decide what they wanted me to do or not do. “I didn’t want to be invasive at all,” he continues. “Having just been through what I had been through, I was still in that grieving stage. I think that helped. The mother of the twins said I could photograph whatever I wanted. They had an open casket, the twins side by side. She wanted people to see how young these kids were. The husband was very upset — not about the pictures, but the infants were swept out of his arms, so he was in the worst place.” Cofield was shooting that assignment for The New York Times, but was careful about what he sent in. “I didn’t feel like these needed to be published. I ended up using a picture of the casket that was more subtle.” It all figures into his thinking about what should go in his book. “I want to keep making pictures,” he says. “I hate to put stages of grief in the book, but I do think grief turns and twists a little bit and you come back to certain emotions at some point. My wife and I have a baby coming along and maybe that’s a part of the book. I’ve been shooting pictures of her pregnant and pictures of our ultrasounds and things like that. Maybe it goes in there and maybe it doesn’t, but I’m being open to whatever emotions come up and see if that evolves more. “I just don’t feel like it’s at a closing point yet, but I’m also interested in going back to archival pictures of me and my dad and our relationship and maybe putting some of that in there too. I’d like to include him in it more as opposed to just my own process of grief.” The circumstance of his father’s death is a complicating factor. “I don’t know if I’ve quite worked it through myself,” he says. “It’s like a separate thing. There’ve been moments where we meet with police officers and they try and give some hope. They do a good job of managing that. It’s like they try and give you something, but not get you too excited about things. There have been moments where it feels like maybe this could be closed. At the end of the day, we know enough about the person that killed my dad to make our own assumptions about how he got to their place and how this even happened. I haven’t worked through that entirely.”
THERAPY
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ofield’s photography has become an avenue of therapy in dealing with his trauma. “We’re living in a violent city and living in Midtown where we can hear gunshots from our house,” he says. “I think about that on a daily basis now. And now that we’re raising a son, I feel terrified a little bit. I’m responsible for my kid and this happened to our family and my dad, my own dad, right down the street. There’s a lot of weeds to work through there, you know?” As art, as therapy, as inspiration, it is making him see things in different ways. “As sad as it is and traumatic, I think there’s been a lot of growth in the way that I think about art,” he says. “I just have opened up and loosened up a little bit and I’m trying to have less and less control over the pictures. My loose goal for 2022 is to just shoot — be shooting on more film and letting things be more vulnerable.”
“As sad as it is and traumatic, I think there’s been a lot of growth in the way that I think about art.”
opposite: Shattered glass in the window of a store in West Memphis, Arkansas. below: Rotten fruit that was forgotten and left in a gift basket.
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