Sara O'Connell: Speak, Old Florida
Sara O'Connell, Speak, Old Florida
Written by Trip Avis
Home is a complex concept; it is almost lenticular, looking different depending on your perspective. Many argue that home is a state of mind over a specific geographic location, an idea more than an actuality. Home can also live inside a memory. We keep a frozen version of things we once knew, unravaged by life’s inevitable pain and change, safely ensconced in the folds of our hippocampus. Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal memoir Speak, Memory (or Speak, Mnemosyne, to conjure the good graces of the Greek goddess of memory) comes to mind. Nabokov preserved dreamy, exacting memories from his boyhood before the revolution, which took him from all he knew. Photography can have the same safeguarding effect, as demonstrated by Sara O’Connell in her haunting yet tender Florida project.
Sara O'Connell, Speak, Old Florida
Palm Beach has always been a cyclical environment, coming in and out of fashion every few decades. Tycoon Henry Flagler brought the former sandy swamp lands to prominence during the Gilded Age, and that popularity ebbed and flowed through the succeeding years. When O’Connell was growing up—before cutting her teeth in photography practice at the Savannah College of Art and Design—Palm Beach had comfortably fallen out of vogue with the jet-setting New Englanders and industry elite. For those growing up in South Florida, it felt like a reclamation of home; no need to share this paradise with the dreaded snowbirds outside a small window of months called ‘season.’ The hot, cracked asphalt we longboarded was ours; the grit of sand between our toes was our dominion. It was a teenage dreamland of faded storefronts selling seashell tchotchkes, stretches of unblemished beaches, and 1970s pastel ranch homes.
Sara O'Connell, Speak, Old Florida
After the COVID-19 pandemic, many out-of-towners made Palm Beach and the surrounding areas their permanent residence, decamping from a pandemic-ravaged Northeast and constructing glimmering tower condominiums and palatial beachside mansions. In a few short years since the beginning of a world-shifting 2020, Palm Beach doesn’t very much look or feel like what it once did. O’Connell’s project is about bottling nostalgia, but most importantly, it is an attempt to reclaim a South Floridian identity. Her photographs, harnessing the potent power of memory, seek permanence in the ephemeral. She captures a quiet beauty in the mundane, eschewing glamour shots that promote a rarified exclusivity; instead, she evokes a Florida that feels subtle and intimate, one O’Connell knows and loves: “A big goal I try to achieve with my work is to make it feel nostalgic, almost deja-vu, or a strong feeling of familiarity.”
When one imagines South Florida, they are likelier to picture bright, dazzling shots of verdant coconut palms, pink-hued Mizner villas, and cloudless azure skies. O’Connell offers the converse of this cultural conception, depicting a nocturnal Florida: “I fell in love with night photography; I’ve always been interested in empty places. I’ve always found them peaceful, at least under the right circumstances. Places come alive during the day with the normal hustle and bustle, but also at night. Everything is still and quiet; [it provides] a new perspective.” Her photographs of night-drenched strip malls, parking lots, and storefronts are equally eerie and comforting, liminal spaces imbued with a vespertine energy. It is as if these places announce their sentience before O’Connell’s patient eye.
Sara O'Connell, Speak, Old Florida
Home is different for everyone, as is Florida. For some, it is a heat-stroked, conservative wasteland spawning endless “Florida Man” clickbait stories. For others, it is a glitzy playground for Fortune 500 members and former presidents. For locals like Sara O’Connell, it is a place where enchantment is always present, waiting to be noticed. From the rugged, feral beauty of the Everglades to the Art Deco hotels of sepia yesteryear, Florida offers endless opportunities for a Kodak moment, a memory embedded like sea glass or beach tar on your foot.
