| My photographs fuse a gothic sensibility with performative elements and traditional landscape imagery, in order to explore the metaphoric potential of the environment. My most recent project was shot while on solitary kayaking and hiking trips along the Delaware River Valley, using a medium format camera and basic camping supplies. In many works, traces of my body are visible as I merge with, take refuge in, and lose myself in the natural world. In some scenes my body is dwarfed by the primordial landscape, as if swallowed up by nature; in others I dissolve myself in a rush of water, or am nearly engulfed in a creeping fog. Many photographs reveal evidence of some seemingly paranormal event—a fire burning in a river, or an ambiguous, intimate encounter with a fox. | 
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Megan Cump is a photographer living and working in New York City.
My photographs fuse a gothic sensibility with performative elements and traditional landscape imagery, in order to explore the metaphoric potential of the environment. My most recent project was shot while on solitary kayaking and hiking trips along the Delaware River Valley, using a medium format camera and basic camping supplies. In many works, traces of my body are visible as I merge with, take refuge in, and lose myself in the natural world. In some scenes my body is dwarfed by the primordial landscape, as if swallowed up by nature; in others I dissolve myself in a rush of water, or am nearly engulfed in a creeping fog.
Many photographs reveal evidence of some seemingly paranormal event—a fire burning in a river, or an ambiguous, intimate encounter with a fox. There is something feral and haunting in these mysterious scenes: sleeping with foxes in a cavern, disembodied limbs emerging from a waterfall, charred bones burning in flames, and my body, in deathly repose, camouflaged among rocks on the riverbed. Through these enigmatic photographs, boundaries shift, blurring the line between human and landscape, and human and animal.
For me, the natural world is a charged, animated space, sometimes sheltering and at other times brutal, where a kind of revelation or rapture can occur. Nature’s regenerative powers exert an almost magnetic hold on me, and in its savage growth and inevitable decay, I see the possibility of struggle and transformation. I’m seduced by these raw metamorphoses, bewitched by fleeting shifts of light, and fascinated by the instability of elements throughout the seasons, these changing, yet eternal, states. My photographs evoke a world stripped of all but natural elements and primal urges, simultaneously beautiful and harsh, horrific yet sublime.
My explorations of the unknown landscape also allude to a parallel, yet more internal, journey, a voyage into the unconscious. In this way, I think of my work as intensely psychological, and each photograph begins to suggest a personal mythology, narratives of near-death and rebirth. My work builds on photography’s historic dialogue with mortality and memory, presence and absence. Important influences include Freud’s concepts of the uncanny, turn-of-the-century spirit photography, and acts of sudden transformation found in myths. Like images from a vivid dream, my photographs document a poignant convergence of nature and the psyche.
