Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink the River, published by Stanley/Barker, feels like a soft knock on a hidden door, a call to step into a world where patience, intimacy, and a fierce kind of stillness shape photography’s heartbeat. This isn’t just a book of images; it’s a testament to her dance with her surroundings, her chosen family, and the stubborn art of carving beauty from a world that often feels jagged and unwelcoming. Through large-format shots and a firsthand, almost sacred process, Guilmoth turns Maine’s rural edges into a canvas that’s both deeply hers and somehow ours too.

Right from the start, Flowers Drink the River hums with slowness, not a drift into nothing, but a deliberate, soul-settling way of seeing. Guilmoth’s talked about hyper fixation as her guide, how waiting, watching, and wandering become a balm against life’s noise. She’ll shift a spiderweb with a jeweller’s care or hold her breath for the exact tilt of a snake into the dark. It’s this reverence that seeps into her frames, freezing them in a hush that pulls you in.

There’s a snake, coiled at a branch’s tip, peering into the night, a moment she gifts you to linger in, as if you were there beside her. Or the waterfall, where light brushes mist and the landscape cups it, lifting the mundane into something that feels like a fleeting dream.

For Guilmoth, photography’s an act of defiance, a grip on beauty when the world tries to claw it away. She’s called it her stand against forces that grind life down, especially for those on the margins. This book’s more than a pretty wander; it’s a refusal to vanish, a quiet roar. You see it clearest in her portraits of trans and queer friends, lovers, her chosen kin. There’s a closeness here that’s more than skin-deep, it’s lived, felt, known. A young female sits in grass, water spilling from her lips as she gazes beyond, a tender, almost mythic surrender to nature that whispers strength. These aren’t outsider glances; they’re shared heartbeats, a bond that hums through every line.

What hooks me most is what happens beyond the lens. Guilmoth’s process is raw, physical, she gathers mica dust from mines to shimmer spiderwebs, bends mugwort stems to ferry them home, develops film in her bathtub with a chemist’s precision. It’s not just making do; it’s keeping her hands in the earth, her soul in the frame. You feel that weight in her images: five rows of leaves, holes carved like masks, watched by a cat, a gentle stage where nature plays itself out. Spiderwebs thread the book, fragile yet fierce, glinting as you turn the pages, a flicker of magic sparked between her world and yours. It’s tactile, like you’re brushing the dust off them yourself.

This sets her miles apart from the documentary crowd, where the camera often peers from a safe perch. Guilmoth shuns that, none of that academic stare on working-class or marginalised lives. She shoots what she’s part of what she loves, a thumb in the eye of entitlement. From her own working-class roots, she’s wrestled art from a life without plush safety nets, full-time jobs, broken cameras patched with duct tape, a vow to never climb out of her bracket even as her work sings. It’s a grit I can’t help but admire, a thread that makes her images less an escape and more a hunt for wonder in the rough and real. Growing up in Aberdeen, where granite bites the sky and the North Sea mutters, I get that, finding the glow in the grit’s my own quiet chase too.

Her night sky shots hit like a thunderclap, stars speckling the black, tugging you into something vast and humbling. They’re a cosmic flip to her finer stitches, like spiderwebs or leaf clusters, whispering that beauty’s as grand as it is small. It’s a pulse in her work: no matter where you’re planted, even in Maine’s tucked-away corners or Aberdeen’s windswept streets, between work and just getting by, there’s something to unearth. Those starry frames feel like a nod to that, a reminder that the universe leans in close if you let it.

Guilmoth’s craft doesn’t stop here. Since Flowers, she’s been tinkering, expired Polaroid 4x5s, bioluminescent powders, homemade filters for moonlit shots. A new book’s brewing with her girlfriend, stitching a decade of photos, found bits, and flea-market relics into something fresh yet familiar. But it all feels like one long, unbroken thread. She’s said her photography’s her life stretched out, and Flowers Drink the River carries that heft, a peak and a path forward. It’s about transformation: hers, her art’s, her community’s, the earth’s. Beauty’s not snatched here; it’s coaxed, discovered, cradled close.

This book’s a stunner, a love song to patience, connection, and resilience. Guilmoth’s direct, heart-in approach crafts images that stick, personal yet wide open. In an age of quick snaps and toss-away shots, it’s a call to pause, to really see, to step into the world rather than just nab it. It’s not just photography; it’s a way of being, defiant, gentle, and damn near sacred.

For me, it’s a nudge to slow my own roll. Here in Aberdeen, where the days can blur grey and the sea’s a moody muse, I’m itching to try her patience, linger longer at the harbour, watch the light shift on a cobble, see what whispers back. Guilmoth’s shown me that’s where the magic hides, not in the rush, but in the wait. Flowers Drink the River isn’t just a book to flip through; it’s a lens to live through, and that’s what makes it linger long after the last page.

Regards

Alex