In the summer of 2021, billions of cicadas emerged from the ground across the eastern United States to mature, reproduce, and die in a month-long cacophony of mating calls and littered shells. The insects were part of Brood X, a subset of cicadas that lives most of their lives underground before resurfacing en masse once every 17 years. Using this cycle as a site of reflection, Summer Song documents the cicadas’ brief above-ground life to explore notions of predestination, the individual versus the collective, and the relationship between beauty and revulsion. In doing so, the series examines a phenomenon straddling the threshold between the human experience and the greater timescales governing the Earth’s natural rhythms.

Copies of Summer Song are available here.