Triggered: Michael Northrup

Blind Nurse, 1977, ⒸMichael Northrup

Image and Text by Michael Northrup

This image is of my former wife, Pam, very early in our relationship. She was a nurse and through her uniform I was always reminded of the famous image of a sailor tightly locked in a kiss with a nurse at the end of WWII. To me that was pure romanticism. The white stockings gave that nurse a kind of angelic purity. Pam inspired me for years.

The background is the house we lived in at the time. And it had the funkiest most graphic faux stone tar paper covering it entirely. This side of the house faced west and was absolutely hammered with the sun. It created a hard drop shadow of the figure, making the image, for me, to have a kind of apocalyptic feel.... as if an atomic bomb just went off. It seemed fitting to have my wife face that light and shield her eyes because of it. I thought at the time the two windows in the back served as the missing eyes of the figure. This image has so much of what I love about photography, light, mystery, discovery, and beauty.

To view more of Michael Northrup’s work, visit his website here.