Brooke Shaden

Brooke Shaden creates staged photographic worlds in which nature, grief and imagination meet. Her artist statement describes a largely solitary self-portrait practice: she becomes both the maker of the image and a figure within it. Working with the surroundings of Northern Arizona, she often builds scenes on location rather than treating landscape as a neutral backdrop. The resulting compositions use darkness and vulnerability alongside the possibility of hope. Her website combines the images with process material and teaching, allowing readers to move between a scene's narrative and the decisions behind its making. A useful starting point is to follow how the body relates to the ground, vegetation and available space. Those relationships give concrete form to themes of change and loss without requiring the photograph to illustrate a single literal story.