“Widline is taking on urgent questions in a way that feels open, like an invitation,” says Kristen Gaylord, the Herzfeld curator of photography and media arts at MAM. “The work isn’t just about what’s been lost, it’s about what she’s built in its place.”
Cadet, who is gracious and thoughtful but reserved, was born in Haiti and lived there until she was 10. Her mother immigrated to the United States when Cadet was quite young, and the photographer joined her years later.
Her early memories of Haiti are hazy, a feeling she evokes in many of her images. “I remember walking to school together with my sister every morning,” Cadet says, “wearing a uniform and passing these plants and flora along the walk.” Otherwise, she has almost no coherent memory of her girlhood.
Cadet’s visions of her mother during those early years are also sparse. “One day she was there, and then one day she wasn’t,” she says.
For much of her childhood, Cadet’s relationship with her mother was sustained through occasional phone calls and, more tangibly, photographs. Once or twice a year, Cadet’s father would hire a photographer to take formal portraits of Cadet and her sister, which he sent to Cadet’s mother. Cadet later found one such photo tucked into a book in her mother’s New York apartment in Washington Heights; in it, the sisters stand side-by-side in complementary red and pink dresses. They wear matching white socks and Mary Jane shoes. Each holds a stuffed animal, grins stretched wide across their faces.
“Photographs [were] a way for my mom to keep tabs on us while we were still in Haiti,” Cadet says. “They were objects that could travel across distance and time.”
Widline Cadet, Si ou ta dwe bliye wout lakay ou (lè tout limyè yo etenn) (Should You Forget Your Way Home (When All the Lights Go Off), 2021. Inkjet prints. 40 × 64 in. (101.6 × 162.56 cm.) Christine A. Symchych and James P. McNulty.
© Widline Cadet
Cadet reconfigures those memories in her photograph Si Ou Ta Dwe Bliye Wout Lakay Ou (Lè Tout Limyè Yo Etenn) (Should You Forget Your Way Home (When All The Lights Go Off). The work centers twin women in gingham dresses modeled after Cadet’s school uniforms, their backs turned and faces obscured as they enter a dense brush. Behind them, the camera lingers as if it might follow the girls into the unknown.
