Tracie Dawn Williams
Half-truths
This image is from Williams’s ongoing project Looking for Answers in the Desert, which intertwines New Mexico’s atomic and scientific histories with her personal family narrative. In 2015, she began the project with her mother as her traveling companion, using photography as a tool to reconnect after spending over a decade abroad. While near the Texas border in the town of Artesia, Williams made this image inside the defunct Abo Elementary School. Built in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, it was the first public school in the United States constructed entirely underground, designed to function as a fallout shelter in the event of nuclear war.
Tracie Dawn Williams is an educator and photographer making work at the intersection of research, documentary and fine art. She holds an MFA from the International Centre of Photography-Bard and was a Film Fellow with the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio in Brooklyn. Williams experiments with multiple mediums and genres in her storytelling, always viewing those she documents as collaborators. Hailing from the deserts of New Mexico, she now calls NYC home.