Shawna Prather is a photographer, writer, folklorist, and historian based in West Texas. Shawna’s passion for history and lore is evident in her photographic explorations of time and landscape in and around the Texas ranchland where she lives with her husband and their seven children.
“My entire life, I’ve dreamt of being able to time travel. History speaks to me, and I’m captivated by the notion that what’s present today is history to some future person. I’m keenly interested in how we experience memory and nostalgia. I see my work as a time capsule meant to be revisited in the future.”
While documenting diverse subjects - the cycles of her family-owned cattle ranch, the deteriorating remnants of farmhouses and barns in the countryside, the daily life of her large family, and the wildflowers native to her region - each of these is a piece of a larger whole: a mission to preserve the stories that become our history, our memory, the past which we will one day long to reconnect with. Shawna’s photographic documentaries are the time machine she has always wanted, her future means of travel back to the past.
