Sadie Cornette Cook – My Breath

On August 27, between 3:04 and 7:15 pm, I bent over a desk in the computer lab, scanning my breath. I want to hold onto my body. I want to understand all its sides and parts. I bound the breaths into a book, interlacing the scans with photographs–sequences of my body, other bodies, people I care about, strangers and strange things.

I think about language a lot. To me, pictures on breath feels like a definition of speech. That’s what I want my photographs to be. I want these photographs to feel like when an acquaintance stops me on the street to say hi and ask how I am doing and I take a deep breath and I say everything I’m really feeling and thinking with all the stammers and stutters and half-said sentences.

Sadie Cornette Cook (1997) is from North Carolina. This May, she will graduate from Yale with a BA in photography.