Photos, prints, and drawings by Elise Nicol. Contact me at elise(dot)a(dot)nicol(at)gmail.com.
One of the first truly intentional images I ever made was based on news photos of victims of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Years later I find I am still making similar images, still searching for the motivations behind carnage – from the heaped corpses in Rwanda to the ravages of climate change. Of course, lines between aggressor and victim are never clear, and the tangle of violence is only becoming knottier. Even once benevolent “mother nature” has become an ominous threat, transformed by humanity’s wanton destruction from provider to avenger seemingly intent on our annihilation. It’s this transmogrification of men to monsters, mother to murderer that I’ve worked to depict in these images.