Mourning Dove


On February 2024, I suffered an accident that had me lose the right, upper part of my lip and my home all at once. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through, trying to recover whilst moving from place to place searching for a new home. Eventually, I found a house that, with a bit of work and a lot of love, became my dream home. My favourite thing about it is the wildlife that surrounds it—there are trees and wild plants all around it, shelter and sustenance to insects and singing birds.

Shortly after I moved in, a mourning dove whose nest I could see from our kitchen window laid two eggs. The baby birds hatched and grew their feathers and flew away. She then laid two more eggs. These birds hatched and grew some feathers but before they could fly away, some creature came in and ate them both, one at a time, leaving behind a trail of feathers and a severed pair of wings.

Photography has always been a healing practice for me but with everything I was going through, it took me a while to want to even touch my camera again. I got used to seeing my changed image on the mirror, but seeing my face through the camera lens became very painful. It made everything more real somehow.

I felt very connected to these birds and I really mourned their absence. I collected the wings and 50 feathers and decided to create from them—in tribute to their lives and to honour my own. With them, I did my first self-portrait session since the accident, a series I am currently expanding into a collection of photographs. To accompany the images, I decided to write 50 poems, one for each feather. This is a project that is currently in progress.


© L. Salgado 2024 All Rights Reserved

© L. Salgado 2024 All Rights Reserved