These dreamy photos document one woman’s bicoastal coming of age

Sophia Cutino has always been driven by “the fear of losing a moment or a feeling”. As a child, she stored pictures and receipts in scrapbooks, and rocks and shells in jars. In her teens, she discovered a new mode of preservation in film photography. “I became obsessed with experiencing as much as possible, and with religiously documenting those experiences,” she tells Dazed.

The more Cutino learned of life, the more she realised just how precarious the act of preservation really is. What do you keep and what do you let go? What images and objects can truly represent an identity in flux? It’s for this reason that the 23-year-old describes her debut photobook, Diaries of a Wet Bird, as “both a coming of age and an obituary”. “This collection follows my desire for something to hold on to,” she writes in the introduction. “I’m not sure if this preservation is out of sentimentality or compulsion. How do you keep what fails to sit still?”

Pieced together from the many hundreds of photographs of her adolescence in Southern California and New York, the inaugural edition from indie publisher Sunstroke Press flits between the glistening promise of youth and the inevitability of decay. It is cyclical in its arrangement. Two poems bookend the 35mm images, which begin in black and white, before slipping into colour, and fading into obscurity once more. At turns electrifying and elegiac, image pairings work to romanticise and contort the notion of youth. We see dreamy scenes of girlhood, the kind fit for an early Sofia Coppola film – lipstick-stained cigarettes, half-naked bodies lounging across lawns and lakes, intoxicated summer nights. Opposite are shots of roadkill, trash, and graveyards. Beauty and nihilism, hand in hand.

Cutino’s dead things function as a memento mori of sorts, underscoring the fragility of the memories and experiences she holds dear. They also illustrate her personal philosophy of photography. Of all her inspirations – Patti Smith, Cookie Mueller, and Nan Goldin among them – it’s Susan Sontag who has most profoundly influenced her approach to the viewfinder. Upon first reading On Photography (1977), Sonntag’s concept of the medium as “a soft murder” bit Cutino hard and refused to let go. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt,” Sontag writes.

In an analogy that bristles with the decomposing animal carcasses littering her pages, Cutino takes this idea further, likening the “twilight art” of photography to taxidermy. “Photography is like taxidermy to me. It challenges time directly, prolonging moments beyond their expiration date. It delays what is fleeting, so you can hold its beauty in your palm a little longer,” she explains. “But photography and taxidermy both take away a portion of what exists – a portion of the original entity that can’t ever be had again.”

The trappings of small-town religion – crucifixes, shrines, and roadside signs – give the publication its gothic edge. Raised Catholic, Cutino has always felt a “subconscious gravitation” towards questions of “femininity, god and death”. The religious signifiers in her photographs reflect her restless search for meaning amid the randomness; what she describes as “the arguably universal desire for strong convictions, for something to matter”. The churchly icon of the white dove rings especially loud and echoes the predicament of the book’s title.

“The ‘wet bird’ comes from the comic saying, ‘A wet bird never flies at night’, attributed to comedian Jackie Vernon,” Cutino explains. “It sounds profound, but regardless of what meaning we extrapolate or attach to it, it signifies nothing. From my immature understanding of the world, this is synonymous with existence. Across these pages, the wet bird flaps aimlessly at all times but night.” 

There’s something bittersweet about Cutino mourning her youth while still very much living it. She’s aware of the irony, calling her book an “unfair, incomplete memoir” in her final poem. “I’ve been romanticising my adolescence since before I was in it. Even now, my frontal lobe isn’t fully developed yet, and I constantly question what I’m taking for granted,” she admits. “I guess this book is informed by my obsession with things changing beyond my control, and how to not be so scared of that.” 

In this way, Diaries of a Wet Bird captures the contradictions of youth. With hindsight, and each passing year, it’s easy to look back and believe we should have lived more freely. But even in its pleasures and transience, adolescence deals in absolutes. For now, Cutino has one request: “I want this book to be tied in a neat black bow, consoling us as we figure out who we are, what truly matters, and what we’re supposed to do next.” 

Diaries of a Wet Bird by Sophia Cutino is published by Sunstroke Press and is available to order here now.