Pia-Paulina Guilmoth made the photographs in Flowers Drink the River over the first two years of her gender transition, in the forests, fields and rivers around her home in rural central Maine. The book is not a diary in any conventional sense. Working with a large-format camera and film, Guilmoth stages small sculptures from spider silk, flowers and other gathered material, then waits for weather, water, light or a passing moth to alter them, and photographs what the land does in reply. Her images arrive hazy, flash-lit and streaked with light aberrations, so that mud, stone, deer, moths and bodies seem to share one continuous surface. Under the moon, the boundaries between people, animals and ground loosen.
Running through the sequence is the risk of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town, and the counterweight of a queer and working-class community close at hand. Ritual, eroticism, defiance and intimacy alternate: girlfriends urinating from tree branches, mud-drenched bodies intertwined, a burning house, nocturnal animals. Guilmoth has described keeping her first HRT consultation secret, certain she could neither transition safely nor hide a changing body in that place. The photographs answer that predicament by building a utopia just out of reach, an animistic search for beauty, safety and magic where they are scarce.
The book is as deliberately made as the photographs. Eighty pages appear in a three-quarter Swiss-bound hardcover, its cover carrying reproductions of aged pink craft paper Guilmoth found in an abandoned house nearby, over which a spider web coated in powdered red pigment has been adhered; a cloth nameplate sits on top, and a facsimile 4×5 contact print made in her bathroom is tipped onto the inside cover.
For a collector, the case rests on the work itself. The photographs were singled out for a special mention by the 2025 Aperture PhotoBook Awards jury, and the cover’s construction makes the physical object an extension of the co-creation the pictures describe. The book brings material experiment and lived experience into relation, recording two years in which the photographer was reconsidering her body, her surroundings and the possibility of belonging.
