With These Hands...
...is a photomontage exploring the expressive power of human hands as both physical and symbolic tools. I first explored this series as an undergraduate student at SUNY New Paltz while studying American Sign Language. This work centers on the human hand as both a tool and a storyteller, exploring its power to communicate, create, and preserve memory.
The project was born from a very personal starting point. In the weeks before my grandmother’s death, I photographed her hands and wrote short sentences recording the many ways she had used them throughout her life. That intimate experience of considering the life stories that hands can contain became the foundation for this larger body of work.
For the final montage, I photographed the hands of fourteen individuals—friends, family members, acquaintances—who spanned a range of ages, genders, races, and backgrounds. Using American Sign Language, each subject posed to spell out the phrase “With These Hands.” Alongside their images, they contributed a single written sentence, completing the phrase: “With these hands...” The responses were as varied as the people themselves—some tender, some practical, some profound—forming a chorus of lived experiences tied to the everyday and extraordinary roles our hands play.
Although most of the participants were not deaf, two had some degree of hearing impairment, and many were connected to ASL either through education, relationships, or interpretation. By weaving together the language of signing, the diversity of the subjects, and the personal nature of their statements, the piece became not only a meditation on physical touch and function, but also a collective portrait of identity, memory, and the shared human condition.
Hands are often overlooked in traditional portraiture, relegated to the background of the face as the primary site of recognition. In this work, they move to the foreground, becoming central conveyors of meaning. Viewers are invited to connect with the montage both visually and textually, relating the gestures and words of others back to their own lived experiences—how their own hands shape, nurture, build, comfort, and communicate.