Men in groups. Groups of men with ideas. Ideas about other groups of men. Men they perceive as weaker. Weakness the everlasting enemy. Enemies everywhere. Everywhere a war front.
The most dangerous people envision themselves as both David and Goliath. The paradox—they believe in their righteousness as a blameless victim, but they move with the unconsidered force of an aggressor. Like a chemical reaction, this combination leads to a lethal blindness. No one is immune to such thinking, but when we see it writ large—in militias, in nations, in any group with any weapons—what is the most frightening is the human capacity for cruelty costumed as justice.
And what is the origin of such violence? And what causes ordinary fear to metastasize into chaos, into conspiracy, into war? The only way to answer these questions, even provisionally, is to look, to catalogue, to observe in silence.
Jenna Garrett’s Teeth of the Wolf is such an investigation. As an artist she is capable of finding stark beauty in the ordinary—a lake, a forest, a boulder, a room. And her lens has a way of capturing an unguarded, childish stare in a grown man’s face, or the sense of a ghost, just out of frame, just out of sight.
Her subject here is the way a place holds onto a story, and how history is a conflict between histories. How easy it is to be in love with a ghost; a ghost never changes.
— Catherine Lacey
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jenna Garrett is an artist living in San Francisco. Her current practice focuses on the Ozarks in southwest Missouri where she was born. Her work has shown at the Aperture Gallery, Bristol Photo Festival, Photoville, Photo Vogue Festival, Silver Eye Photography Center, and Slideluck Stockholm. She graduated with an MA in Fine Art Photography from the London College of Communication. She can also ride a unicycle, but only in a straight line.
jenna-garrett.com / @particulr
ABOUT THE ESSAY
Catherine Lacey is the author of five books, most recently Biography of X. She lives in New York and Mexico.
catherinelacey.com / @catherinelacey_
ZINE
The limited-edition risograph Teeth of the Wolf zine is available for purchase for $30. Send us an email or message on Instagram to reserve.