Song for the Siren by Shannon Cavarocchi

Song for the Siren began as a self-portrait made in the aftermath of trauma, through which Shannon Cavarocchi (b. 1997, American) sought to reconnect with her body. It grew into a meditation on memory, myth, and transformation. The work moves between portraiture and landscape, where bodies appear and disappear in the natural world, gestures turn into ritual, and water, stone, and skin mirror one another. The women who appear throughout are collaborators. Cavarocchi sees womanhood as a manifestation of nature, and landscapes play a part in healing trauma and reflect cyclical rhythms of regeneration.

Cavarocchi draws on the mythology of Sirens and Nymphs, figures historically suspended between seduction and danger, beauty and violence, freedom and projection. Song for the Siren reclaims these myths and asks what remains when women step outside inherited narratives and begin to author their own.

The book opens with a poem, “Giving Us Away,” by photographer and educator Odette England (b. 1975, Australian). Its images of skin, water, stone, bark and plants, and of a tree cut back, belong to the same elements as the photographs, and its sadness and its naming of where it hurts echo the trauma the series starts from. The poem reads as a companion to the pictures that follow. Like the Siren’s call, the work offers no resolution. The photographs sit between dream and document, tenderness and unease, and suggest a cyclical return: to the body, to memory, and to one another.