Dana Smessaert Turns Grief into Cyanotype and Tableaux in New Series

Dana Smessaert's series In the Blue Light, I Died — three years in the making before the first image existed — has emerged as a poetic exploration of trauma, grief, spiritual death, and rebirth in community, built from cyanotypes, constructed tableaux, and collage.

Smessaert, who earned an MFA in Photography from East Carolina University and now lectures in Graphic Design at Indiana University South Bend, works across photography, design, and writing. Their exhibition record includes the Affordable Art Fair in New York City, Stove Works Gallery, and the Laramie County Library Book Arts Invitational. They serve on the Pride Caucus Leadership team for the Society for Photographic Education and juror the SPE Media Festival.

Where did the project begin?

Smessaert told interviewer Epiphany Knedler that the title had floated in their head for roughly three years before any image materialized. "I never really thought about it being images but more so a project inspired by images," they said. Grief and creative paralysis followed graduation; the breakthrough came from two visits to Athens, Greece — the first in 2022, the second in 2023. "I say sometimes that I actually died there, metaphorically/spiritually," Smessaert said of the first trip. The return became a rebirth.

Athens sharpened their thinking on the polarization of rural and city life, the western fetishization of Greek history, borders, and the Land as an entity. The series drifted into a love story between the soul of the Earth and Humanity — what Smessaert compresses into one phrase: "to love an imperfect thing."

Central to the work is a metaphor practitioners will recognize: the camera as scrying device. Smessaert cites the mirror, used for centuries as a divination tool, arguing that without it "photography actually might be soulless." The viewfinder's mirror creates a moment of friction where subject and photographer meet — a meeting they treat as spiritual.

How was the work actually made?

The first image came in early 2024, prompted by a New Year's show in Smessaert's hometown of South Bend, Indiana — a place they had not lived in for over ten years. The scene was unforgiving: Smessaert attached sugargum pods to their body with wig glue and covered themselves in dead flies collected from a friend's windowsill. It was their first nude, shot in mid-March in northern Indiana, near hypothermia by the end. "The whole time I kept thinking this is why they do this in the southwest," they said.

The series pairs calm images with poems against tumultuous collages, moving through death, love, anger, and rebirth. Smessaert edited much of it while listening to Ethel Cain's albums Perverts and Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You.

Which images anchor the series?

Two works carry particular weight. Laid to Rest came from an unplanned encounter in a protected meadow where Smessaert walked to meditate: an imprint in tall grass, left by a deer or other large animal — "an imprint of rest left on the land." Its poem asks whether love can carry communities through, given a world watching the genocide of the Palestinian people and US communities unable to afford survival needs.

The second, ὠφέλεια (o-fel'-i-ah), began as an intended title of Ophelia, after Hamlet. Research revealed the name's Greek origin: to benefit, profit, or help. Smessaert connected that discovery to surrendering agency while accepting hard truths — "there is a benefit to accepting the truth to things, to circumstances and admitting failures."

What does the practice teach other photographers?

Smessaert frames their method as a slow process of noticing, shaped by four years of depression and grief. Phone photographs made with formal intention — beauty, light, composition — kept them working through the lull. Discovering that Henri Cartier-Bresson stopped photographing late in life to focus on drawing gave them relief, and raised questions about formal exercise as sketchbook practice for photographers.

What comes next?

A new meditative project, currently titled Sorry, I Mixed the Chemicals Too Soon, will combine cyanotype exposures with charcoal drawings — a deliberately immediate, computer-free process that embraces imperfection. Smessaert will also appear at the SPE National Conference in Minneapolis, paneling on teaching art history in a post-AI world and reviewing portfolios for East Carolina University's thrown down.