Arrivals: What’s Left Behind, What Lies Ahead

Idaho…

Arrivals is a collaborative multidisciplinary project, which is shared through this book, as well as through past and upcoming exhibitions, a website, and an award-winning short documentary.

Beginning in 2019, Stephanie Bacon, Andrew Bale and Jon Cox were inspired by their conversations with Palina Louangketh to conduct a series of interviews, and make photographic portraits, with refugees, immigrants, and Native Americans in Boise and beyond, in several locations throughout Idaho.

Our conversations began with simple questions: Where were you born? Why did you leave the place where you were born? How did you come to Idaho, and what do you remember about the impression this place made, when you were newly arrived? No conversation stayed simple; every conversation took us to new places.

The questions that were imagined for refugees of recent arrival, took on different dimensions when we asked them of immigrants and their descendants, and when we asked them of culturally (if not always geographically) displaced members of First Nations. Our visual and formal approaches expanded along with our conversations. Initially photographing our participants in a studio setting, we later began to make environmental portraits, in which our participants are seen in their homes, their workplaces and neighborhoods. We were inspired to photograph the landscape itself, and the characteristic spaces that new arrivals found when they got here: the city, the river, the desert, the mountains, the dams, farms, ranches, mines, reservations, missions and lumberyards. These landscapes may provide a contemplative visual counterpoint to the intensely personal narratives. We thank, with deepest gratitude, everyone who shared their stories with us. It is needless to say that limitations of space prevented our including every story, or every word of any story; but every story reflected the love that people feel for an adopted home, and every story informed our commitment to the project.