There Was Safety Here, 2024

Nancy Cook Photography Fellowship 2025

Cornwall is a beautiful peninsula in Britain’s southwest corner; it has lush forests, stunning cliffs and beaches, and remnants of a long and formative tin mining industry. The winding cliffside trails and hills provide opportunities for privacy and even seclusion. After visiting a friend there in 2023, Reed returned to the States and happened upon a Tate Modern documentary called “Queer Cornwall” that took them by surprise and ignited their curiosity. As the name suggests, the film explores the rural region’s long and rich history of queer art. As early as a century ago, painters such as Marlow Moss, Ithel Colquhoun, and Gluck lived and worked in Cornwall, eschewing gender norms to live on their own terms.

To create these works, Reed connected with queer community members of Cornwall in natural places that were significant to them. Reed merged two images into one, a visual metaphor for the blurred lines between person and place, between one memory and another, and between collective and individual experiences. The images remind us that we can draw strength from the often-hidden queer histories of any place.

Personal Statement

In doing preliminary research for this project, I met with the organization Queer Kernow’s director & historian, Sophie Meyer, to dive deeper into the region’s queer history than could be covered in the short Tate documentary. Sophie shared the complex history of the region- from miraculous gender-changing saints, court records of buggery sentencing, to painters like Henry Scott Tuke and Gluck memorializing their lovers in portraits by the sea. Cornwall can be remembered today, like many places, as a landscape where our queer elders lived and loved and where we can find strength in remembering their stories.