Exhale
Miami, Florida, 2021
A woman finds rest in the cascading water of her shower. In the foreground, a soft yellow peony is in sharp focus, while the silhouetted woman remains blurred. Here water is both cleansing and revealing— a space where exhaustion meets renewal. The contrast suggests both fragility and resilience, the ways in which beauty and labor, visibility, and erasure, coexist within the lives of Haitian women.
“ There’ s something illuminating yet vulnerable in watching my mother age,” notes Charlot about this portrait,“ a quiet testament to the strength found in the daily grind of survival.” Charlot’ s mother is a woman of migration, carrying the weight of movement across lands and generations. Exhale speaks to migration as a journey inscribed on the body— the labor of building a life elsewhere, the quiet resilience of survival, the longing for rest.
Paired with the image, Petals of Youth, where Charlot’ s son bathes with bougainvillea flowers, Exhale becomes part of an intergenerational reflection on rest. One body, young and weightless, revels in the beauty of self-adornment; another, weary and shadowed by a peony, carries the imprints of time and labor.
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