Lensing the Spiritual: Balarama Heller and Pia-Paulina Guilmoth in Conversation
Please join Aperture and Printed Matter for a conversation between artists Balarama Heller and Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, discussing their recent publications: Sacred Place (TIS Books, 2025) and Flowers Drink the River (STANLEY/BARKER, 2025). Heller and Guilmoth will speak individually about their respective works, then discuss overlapping themes of spirituality within their personal narratives.
In 2019, Balarama Heller joined the millions of people who have made the pilgrimage to the Indian town of Vrindavan, said to be the deity Krishna’s childhood home. Across seventy-six full-bleed pages edged in lilac, Sacred Place sequences a chain of photographs made in Vrindavan in the hours before sunrise, a time Heller considers the material and spiritual worlds to be at their most permeable. Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s gender transition, when she began photographing her community in rural Maine, exploring both the joy and terror of life as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Using a large-format camera and a heavy flash, Guilmoth oscillates between the mystical and ominous, and each frame feels as if it’s a small moment captured mid-ritual, leaving us to imagine what transpires outside the frame.
The two publications were both shortlisted titles from the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, currently on view at Printed Matter . Now in its thirteenth year, the awards recognize excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year.Â
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Images: Balarama Heller, Omen, 2019, from Sacred Place, 2025;Â Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, from Flowers that Drink the River, 2025
Balarama Heller (born in New York, 1979) is a New York–based transmedium visual artist whose work explores the intersections of spirituality, myth, ritual, and science. Working between abstraction and representational spaces, Heller reimagines archetypal symbols, creating a visual language of preverbal awareness and photographic sublimation.
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth was born in rural New Hampshire in 1993. She lives and makes art in rural central Maine in Franklin County. Guilmoth is a working-class transgender woman who lives with her partner and two cats in a two-hundred-year-old shoe factory on the edge of the Sandy River. In her free time, she likes to lay in the dirt, hold her friends, and trespass into abandoned houses and barns. Guilmoth’s photography is foremost about harnessing beauty as a form of survival.
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