Photography as guide: A journey through Parkinsons - with Torrance York
About this Event
Photography as guide: A journey through Parkinsons
Artist Talk with Torrance York
Photographer Torrance York shares how her art practice acted as a lifeline following her diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease and continues to serve as a guide in her current work. York takes us through the flow process of making her project and book, Semaphore, and the meaning it holds for her. Recognizing connections between the visual world and her internal experience post-diagnosis, the images inform and offer the viewer the opportunity to draw their own connections. Recent studies have shown that creating and beholding art can positively impact brain health. Is York’s experience further evidence of this conjecture?
About the Artist
Torrance York is a lens-based artist and educator whose photographs transform often-overlooked moments of everyday life into spaces for reflection, inviting viewers to contemplate universal themes of perception, identity, and the unknown.
Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2015, York uses her creative process to integrate this life-altering information into her sense of self. Through her series and book Semaphore (Kehrer Verlag, 2022), she explores the evolving relationship between the progressive illness’s specific consequences and her identity, between her inner and outer worlds, using photography as both a means of inquiry and connection. Her newest body of work, Interstices, extends this investigation, focusing on the less visible, non-motor dimensions of Parkinson's and the intersecting realities of aging.
York's work has been featured in leading photography publications and Parkinson's-focused media, including the Michael J. Fox Foundation Updates and LensCulture's recent “Spotlight: Women Shaping Photography Today.” She has presented her work at the 2023 World Parkinson Congress in Barcelona, to Parkinson's support groups, and at the Neurology Grand Rounds at the University of Virginia, UCLA, and Wake Forest University, speaking about the intersection of art, illness, and lived experience. Most recently, she was a guest speaker for the graduate program at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Fascinated by the relationship between the neural circuits involved in creativity and those affected by Parkinson's disease, York continues to explore photography as a way of making visible what is often unseen. Her work is held in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Danforth Art Museum, and the Fine Art Collection at Montefiore Einstein, New York. Rick Wester Fine Art represents her artwork and she is a member of the Silvermine Artists Guild.
About Fotophase
Fotophase is a nonprofit organization exploring how the act of making photographs can support reflection, agency, connection and well-being for people living through trauma, illness, transition or stress.
This program reflects Fotophase’s commitment to photography practiced as an aesthetic experience that engages attention, perception, emotion and meaning-making. By combining image-making with guided reflection and community conversation, Fotophase creates opportunities for participants to notice how they relate to themselves, their surroundings and one another.
The goal is not to position photography as therapy or a substitute for mental-health care. It is to explore photography as an accessible creative practice that may help people become more present, curious and connected.
Photo credit: Torrance York
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