The Mudhsow Diaries

It's about us. It's about a small circus traveling around the country gathering memories. It's about making sure my kids stay away from the elephants, trying to find a laundromat in a strange town, documenting a world built around blood ties, and sweat: A diary kept over years of traveling with a circus in America became a journey in motherhood and photography, along with an odyssey into the country's forgotten paths and the circus' hidden world. Along the way it also became a journey in reinventing myself and in belonging - in discovering my family in a fleeting cast, reluctantly, and of finding acceptance, slowly, in this close-knit family that is the circus - love unfurled by tenuous chance, as on a tightrope. The diary follows the Kelly Miller Circus, a mosaic of people who live, work and travel together, from Texas to Massachusetts and back again, for ten months out of the year, seven days a week. My husband is an acrobat from Peru; I followed him into another life. On the road we had two sons, and I recorded, through both text and photographs, my life as a new mother and a photojournalist intertwined with the life of a disappearing American tribe.