Explored with Luke Explores!

---

“Phenomenal.”

That’s the word I keep hearing. Not once, not from a single person trying to be kind. But over and over again—from different people, in different states, in different chapters of my life. Friends who’ve never met, never exchanged a single word with each other, all looking at my work and landing on the exact same term.

Phenomenal.

It caught me off guard. For someone who’s spent her life documenting what most people would rather look away from, I’ve never felt comfortable with praise. I’ve always been more familiar with rust than ribbon. But when the word phenomenal arrives multiple times, from disconnected voices, it’s no longer an accident. It’s a pattern. And patterns tell stories.

So I sat with it. And when I looked at my body of work—the raw, weathered, unapologetically honest series from Letchworth Village—I understood what they meant.

This series isn’t pretty. It wasn’t meant to be. Letchworth wasn’t a place of beauty. It was a place of abandonment. Of institutional cruelty dressed in sterile white doctors coats. It was a home to people who never asked to be forgotten. What remains is rot, decay, and the echo of human lives discarded.

But when I walked those halls with my camera in hand, I didn’t see just ruin. I saw truth. And I listened to it.

Every frame in this series is a moment of respect. A pause. A kind of quiet witnessing. I didn’t go there to stage shots or chase aesthetics. I went there because I needed to. Because something in me—maybe the paramedic who’s seen too much, maybe the girl who’s always been different, and who has felt just a little outside of the world—knew I owed those forgotten people the dignity of being seen.

The peeling paint, the rusted beds, the broken glass catching daylight—these aren’t accidents of time. They’re testaments to it. My photography isn’t about decay. It’s about endurance. It’s about what’s left behind, and what that says about who we really are.

So yes, I’ve decided to believe it. To accept the word that keeps being handed to me, again and again.

My photography is phenomenal.

Not because I crave recognition, but because the stories buried inside these images deserve nothing less. Letchworth Village didn’t die with its last patient. It lingers. And through this series, I’ve made damn sure that it still speaks.

And I will never, ever stop listening.

—Emily, A.K.A Rescue Girl