When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak

KHKerry Hallett

When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak explores personal and collective belonging, the disillusionment of childhood and womanhood, and the archetype of the wanderer/outsider. The photographs seem to freeze in time the moment of a "core memory," or the exact instant when naiveté and illusion falls away. Where do we fit in this complex, layered, and enigmatic existence, especially when we learn (often from an early age) that the idealistic world does not exist?

When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak — photo 1

When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak — photo 2

When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak — photo 3

When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak — photo 4

When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak — photo 5

When You Stand Here, No One Can Hear You Speak — photo 6

About this project

My experience as a queer/nonbinary person inherently informs my work; walking through life attuned to others’ preconceived notions of me has opened me to the ways in which people, animals, or even objects may experience misunderstanding, loneliness and isolation, or joy. And perhaps because I felt apart from a very young age, I am drawn to outsiders and discarded objects.

Due to my identity and appearance, I exist outside the neatly defined lines man/woman, of how society expects a person to conform. Because this forced me to question things from a young age, I notice the questioning of others-- “Is this all there is?” and “Is this who I am supposed to be?” I see the ruse, the questioning behind their eyes, the solitary feeling of not fitting in. My photographs capture and consider the nuanced inner lives of the quiet, the forgotten, the overlooked.