Shira Gold is a Vancouver based fine art photographer creating emotive, intimate environmental portrait imagery on delicate but powerfully human subjects of grief, identity and life transitions. Photographic Art Photography Grief Landscape Healing Contemporary Canadian Photographer

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Silence of Noise

In grief, dichotomy and contradiction are pervasive. Grief can consume, while silence can deafen. My series Silence of Noise speaks to my experience of needing distractions to get my mind off of what I’d lost. Yet, even with this desire for diversion, whenever I encountered real noise, it seemed superfluous—empty chatter at odds with the debilitating pain I felt inside.

In nature, snow absorbs both sound and silence. It can be difficult to detect the source of a noise, and the cacophony of the world becomes muffled beneath a blanket of white powder. The snowscapes in this series evoke my feeling of existing between two worlds. On one hand, I occupied the world of the living—surrounded by noise and vibrancy, conversation and community. On the other hand, I was cocooned in grief—a feeling that often muted the clamour of the living. In this sense, snow offers a metaphor for the buffer between my two modes of living—a pregnant pause between the deafening noise outside and the resounding silence of my private anguish.

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