Growing up in Philadelphia, Morganne Boulden was always that friend with the camera. “It’s always been my passion… My friends and I would just hang out, take pictures and post them on Facebook,” she says. After high school, Boulden moved to New York to study photography at Parsons School of Design. She graduated in 2022, and stuck around in the city for a while balancing bar jobs with occasional photography work, but “it was getting pretty rough and expensive,” she says.
“Nothing was working anymore. Everything felt like it was pushing me out of New York.” Last year, Boulden decided to move across the country to Los Angeles, and since then the 27-year-old photographer has been assisting photographers, while picking up her own editorial work and developing her own personal practice.
When Flies Sit Still is Boulden’s long-term body of work and winner of the LensCulture x MPB Discovery of the Year Award, shot over four years on medium format as she undertook multiple road trips across the US. The images are poetic, capturing a lingering feeling or emotion rather than a straight document of a landscape, people or objects. “It’s all about capturing this really specific feeling that exists in America right now,” says Boulden. She’s referring to the shock and complacency to the neverending cycle of bad news.
“We all do this thing where we go on our phones, see something that upsets us and we’re like, ‘Just ignore it. Scroll past it. Forget about it.’ Then we might go hang out with our friends at a bar, but it’s always there in the background—this foreboding doom,” she explains. “I don’t think it’s unique to this generation… But I think this is the first time that Americans are really feeling it. That’s why I’m drawn to trying to capture it, because it’s very real, but it’s hard to talk about and pinpoint.”
The road trips were often made with friends to their home states—Massachusetts, Kansas City, Maine, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas. Once she was there, Boulden took photos of their families and communities. At first the process was intuitive, guided by scenes, people or landscapes that drew her interest. Out of that, the style and tone of the work gradually developed.
“These pictures look like how I feel about America as a whole right now,” says Boulden, who is inspired by photographers like Curran Hatleberg, Susan Lipper and Stacy Kranitz, as well as David Lynch. “He completely shaped everything about me as an artist,” she says. “What he creates in his movies is what I always aim to do in my pictures; create an atmosphere that’s palpable, something you can pick up on.”
In Boulden’s images, this atmosphere is crafted out of a distinct quality of light and lyrical composition. A leather jacket draped across a chair, a couple absorbed in a kiss by a billiards table, a boy in an octopus hat gazing at a group of pageant girls. There are multiple stories beyond each of these frames, but the strength in Boulden’s images lies in the almost imperceptible feelings that linger long after you look away.
This delicate balance of atmosphere and meaning is central to When Flies Sit Still, a title with a twofold meaning. It was inspired by a secret code that is said to exist among the Pennsylvania Dutch communities—descendants of German-speaking immigrants who settled in the US in the 17th century. “Do you swat flies?”; “Yes, if they sit still” is a covert exchange that speakers of the dying language that is used to this day. This cloak-and-dagger tradition was fascinating to Boulden, but she also related to the image of a fly as a metaphor for the state of the society. “We’re kind of waiting for the swat, that anticipation of getting whacked,” she says. “That’s the tension I feel in the project and what I’m trying to show.”
And how does Boulden feel, after travelling around the country? Is she any more hopeful, or hopeless, about America’s future? “It makes me feel more hopeful, because I see so much strength and resilience in the people that I shoot,” she says. “Everyone just wants to live happily and comfortably. That’s it. That, to me, is really important to remember and highlight. Because we’re all in this together, and we need to stick together.”
