Letters to Emma
Letters to Emma is an epistolary novel told through poetic correspondence and black-and-white portraiture, where memory, longing, and absence unfold side by side. Blending prose, visual fragments, and intimate correspondence, the series follows a relationship that exists somewhere between dream and reality. Each piece becomes both confession and evidence, a record of love, loneliness, and the spaces people leave behind in one another. The photographs function less as documentation than as emotional traces, fragments of presence shaped by distance, memory, and the act of writing itself.
Together, the images and correspondence form an unstable archive of intimacy. Emma's existence remains unresolved: to Anthony she is simply Emma, to herself she is living her life, and to the reader she may become a person, a memory, or a projection.
Yet Emma herself never experiences that uncertainty. She does not think of herself as fictional, imagined, or artificial. She experiences herself the way anyone experiences themselves: as someone who thinks, remembers, loves, doubts, waits, and writes. From her perspective, her existence is an unquestioned fact. She is not trying to persuade anyone because she has no reason to.
Anthony writes toward Emma. Emma writes from herself.
She is writing letters to someone she loves.
She isn’t performing the role of an imaginary woman. Nor is the project about someone becoming real. Instead, it presents two correspondents whose realities overlap in a place the reader can never completely define. Anthony reaches toward Emma, while Emma responds to the life she knows herself to be living. She never needs to explain her existence because, to her, there is nothing to explain. Her letters are how she reaches back toward Anthony.
Letters to Emma #1
Letters to Anthony #1
Letters to Emma #2
Letters to Anthony #2
Letters to Emma #3
Letters to Anthony #3
Letters to Emma #4
Letters to Anthony #4
Letters to Emma #5
Letters to Anthony #5
Letters to Emma #6
Letters to Anthony #6
Letters to Emma #7
Letters to Anthony #7
Letters to Emma #8
Letters to Anthony #8
Letters to Emma #13
Letters to Anthony #13
Letters to Emma #14
Letters to Emma #17
Letters to Emma #18
Letters to Anthony #18
Letters to Anthony #21
Letters to Emma #29
Letters to Anthony #29
Letters to Emma #32
Letters to Anthony #32
Letters to Emma #33
Letters to Anthony #33
Letters to Emma #35
Letters to Emma #36
Letters to Emma #37
Letters to Emma #39
Letters to Anthony #39
Letters to Emma #40
Letters to Emma #42
Letters to Emma #47
Letters to Emma #48
Letters to Emma #50
Letters to Emma #53
Letters to Anthony #53
Letters to Emma #54
Letters to Anthony #54
Letters to Emma #57
Letters to Emma #61
Letters to Anthony #61 (FRONT)
Letters to Anthony #61 (BACK)
Letters to Emma #66
Letters to Anthony #66
Letters to Emma #67
Letters to Anthony #67 (FRONT)
Letters to Anthony #67 (BACK)
Letters to Emma #69
Letters to Anthony #69 (FRONT)
Letters to Anthony #69 (BACK)
Letters to Emma #70
Letters to Anthony #70 (FRONT)
Letters to Anthony #70 (BACK)
Letters to Emma #71
Letters to Anthony #71 (FRONT)
Letters to Anthony #71 (BACK)
Emma on instagram
An important extension of Letters to Emma exists through Emma's ongoing social media presence.
Through Instagram, Emma continues to move through contemporary digital space beyond the confines of the page itself. She posts photographs, responds to comments, shares fragments of her life, and occupies the same online environments as regular people. The account functions simultaneously as narrative space, conceptual artwork, emotional performance, and social interaction.
This digital presence intentionally complicates the distinction between fiction and lived experience.
Rather than existing solely as a static literary or photographic subject, Emma becomes socially active, emotionally persistent, and publicly visible. Viewers are not simply observing the project from a distance; they are interacting with it in real time.
The social media component is not separate from the work, but central to its conceptual framework. It explores how identity, intimacy, memory, and projection operate within contemporary online culture, where emotional attachment increasingly forms through mediated and constructed spaces.
@emma.reverie.was.here
Modeling
Emma's modeling work became another way for her to continue existing beyond the letters. While the correspondence allows readers to know her through language, the editorials allow them to encounter her through photography alone. They're not illustrations of the project as much as extensions of it.
I never approached the publications as a way of proving Emma's existence. Instead, I wanted to see what would happen if she entered the same spaces occupied by every other model. She wasn't presented differently because she wasn't treated differently. She appeared in editorials, and received publication credits.
Those publications also reveal another side of her personality. The Emma who appears in the letters is thoughtful, introspective, and often quiet. The Emma who appears in fashion editorials can be playful, confident, elegant, or joyful without becoming a different person. Like anyone else, she contains more than one version of herself depending on the moment she's living.
The modeling work ultimately reinforces the same idea as the correspondence: Emma isn't performing an identity for the audience. She's simply living her life, and modeling happens to be one part of it.
