Tara Wray: Too Tired For Sunshine

Tara Wray: Too Tired For Sunshine by Aline SmithsonNovember 30, 2017

©Tara Wray

Having spent many a summer in rural Vermont, Tara Wray’s new project and soon-to-be book, Too Tired For Sunshine, resonated with me on many levels. Vermont in the winter is not for the faint hearted–it’s bleak and unforgiving and it explains why animals go into hibernation. Layer an internal depression into those gray, cold days and one can understand never wanting to leave the house. Tara’s photographs are about unremarkable moments seen from the point of view of a life off kilter. In a way, Too Tired for Sunshine is a series of little wounds, small observations, and subliminal messages that add up to a David Lynchian realization that normal is a subjective state of mind and perhaps the universe is is more mysterious than we think.

Tara has created a Kickstarter to help get her book our into the world. Yoffy Press is ready to start the presses once her funding is reached.

Tara Wray lives and works in rural Vermont. A graduate of New York University, she is the director of the documentary films Manhattan, Kansas (SXSW 2006 Audience Award), about family relationships and mental illness, and Cartoon College (Vancouver Film Festival, 2012), about the weird and wonderful world of indie cartoonists. She curates interviews with photographers at Vice, Huffington Post, and BUST Magazine, where she focuses on highlighting women in photography. In addition, she curates Some Days Just Are, a collaborative photo series where time dictates narrative, and she’s photo editor for the literary journal Hobart. Wray’s self-published photobooks include Each One Wonderful, (2013) about New York City dogs, and Come Again When You Can’t Stay So Long, (2014) a follow-up to her film Manhattan, Kansas. Her most recent photobook, Too Tired for Sunshine, will be released by Yoffy Press in Spring 2018.

©Tara Wray

Too Tired For Sunshine

Too Tired For Sunshine is a collection of photographs made largely in Vermont, beginning in 2011. Centered on rural landscapes, animals, and strangers, these deeply personal images reflect my state of mind during a period spent battling depression.

Drawn from daily life and wanderings, the photographs in this work focus on unsettling subjects – backyard slaughterhouses, melancholic dogs, disrepair in various forms – as well as depictions of isolation in people, animals, and objects. Often I find myself photographing subjects that appear drastically out of place, seemingly devoid of context.

Making these photographs has given me separation from the darkness, and provided relief from obsessive thinking and feelings of dread. My hope is that people who view this work will discover a sense of unreality – sometimes grotesque, other times absurd, always beautiful – lurking in the midst of ordinary life.