Brea Souders

Starting in my mid-20s I found myself collecting antique photographs of young sisters. This collection lives in a little wooden box that contains my family photos. Around this same time I started to notice my parents aging past their adulthood of my youth. I became more attuned to the fact that they wouldn’t be around forever.  I never had a sister, and I’ve come to believe my fascination with sisterhood is linked to the impermanence of parents. Part of the appeal of a sister is an enduring, shared experience. A sister would be a physical repository and figural representation of my ever- receding childhood. She would be my memories, my youth. With her, even as I lost those things they would not be lost. These turned out to be fraught musings, as without a sister near my own age I felt oddly incomplete. My collection of photographs supported this feeling because most of them date to the early 1900s and depict a certain ideal of sisterhood, one of perfect symmetry. Their world is one of matched dresses and matched poses, matching bows sweeping matched hairstyles. Equality is emphasized and individuality eschewed, when not erased entirely. But, I thought, sisterhood could not be so tidy. I looked more carefully at the pictures and noticed hints of dissymmetry. In the above photograph, the girl to the right has a larger bow than her sister. The pleats in her dress are sharper and more defined. She looks more comfortable with the pose than her sister does. The sister on the left, by contrast, seeming less comfortable, is literally out of the spotlight. The sister on the right is lit much more evenly, and brightly. Whether these differences were parentally orchestrated or are manifestations of thinly veiled tensions, they are an important part of why sisterhood as an abstract concept interests me. A sister is another you. This photograph moves me to imagine another me, however imperfect. An impossible twoness.