An Inner Life Remade by Grief

“Photographs are haunted by the fact that they’re going to outlive us,” says Olivia Crumm. This haunting nature simmers throughout Crumm’s series Wake, an elegiac portrait of the transitionary states of grief—and what can grow in its aftermath.

Crumm’s series began two years ago in the wake of her father’s death after his battle against Alzheimer’s disease. Crumm found herself turning to photography as a means to process her experiences with grief. Photographing with a large-format camera, Crumm choreographs scenes of her friends, her family, and herself that draw from her gestures and experiences as a caretaker for her father. Oscillating between the surreal and everyday, Crumm’s photographs reckon with the otherworldly nature of grief and loss. “I felt like my whole sense of reality had been reordered,” says Crumm. “I was trying to sort out how I could make a picture that embodies that.”

Based in Brooklyn, Crumm studied photography at Bard College before receiving her master’s degree from Yale University in 2025. Crumm’s photographic influences include Julia Margaret Cameron, Lieko Shiga, and Rosalind Fox Solomon—all of whom share a dreamy yet at times uncanny atmosphere in their images. She also cites Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home (1992) as a touchstone photobook, stating, “I’m most drawn to works that really lead with feeling.”

Throughout Wake, Crumm weaves together the visual languages of reflection, layering, and scale to complicate and disorient the landscape of her photographs, which she describes as “constructing a world that feels aligned with my experience of grief.” There is an eerie, heightened sense of mundanity across all of Crumm’s images: a pair of twins pose with faces touched, as if they are merging into the other’s reflection; a ghostly, hazy veil of light obscures two figures staring into the sky at night in a snowy backyard; a dollhouse is cradled gently while fracturing in a mirrorscape. Her use of black-and-white film deepens this eeriness, as she states: “I’m drawn to black and white because it’s not the way we see the world. It creates a separation, bringing us somewhere else.”

Across her series, Crumm threads in mirrors (which she sees as “portals to another world”) as a simultaneous means for reflection and for creating dual selves. In one image, three figures are framed inside a hung mirror, one on each side gently brushing back the hair of the central figure, a mundane yet intimate act of care. Yet an ornate mural on the wall behind them transforms our view of this moment into a painting-like portal, removing it from our own sense of reality. Archival images of her father act as another recurring motif throughout Wake, evoking the multifaceted ways that memory and grief are interlinked. In one image, we see her father’s face scattered across an expanse of sand, slowly disappearing beneath the surface, and in another frame, a series of headshots are obsessively plastered along the interior of a dollhouse room. “It’s a question that a lot of image makers deal with: How do you photograph something that’s no longer there?” states Crumm. “This felt like a way to physically keep him part of the work.”

At the heart of her work, Crumm grapples with the ever-shifting reverberations caused by mourning. Yet, although her series Wake was made in the aftermath of immense loss, she has found a new form of connection in embracing her grief. “I do think I’ve always had, as I’m sure everyone who takes pictures does, a heightened awareness of the mortality you just can’t avoid when you’re photographing people,” Crumm reflects. “But what I feel has shifted is that after death, it’s become a way to stay connected. It feels like more of a bridge.”

Olivia Crumm is a shortlisted artist for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international competition that spotlights new talent in contemporary photography.