Peach Street

Peach Street connects to the universal phenomenon of losing innocence of childhood and navigating the perils and disappointments of the adult world and visualizes my ongoing experience with anxiety and what psychiatrists call derealization, the feeling of being detached from reality. Set in the same location as where I first felt immense panic, my photos create a fictional narrative where a small town, its residents, and the environment are being controlled by a force emanating from the town’s lake. The lake’s aura blinds the residents to its control, forcing them to live in a set way without personal expression or a desire to escape. The protagonist is a nameless girl, played by me, who lives on Peach Street and becomes aware of the lake’s effect and starts to reflect on why she is living this way. Because of her unreliable perception of the world, she must dissect what is real and what is illusion. As she looks closer at the details of her surroundings, she realizes that maybe her own internalized anxiety was the monster all along.