Sometimes I Throw Cherries Into the Sky: A Portrait of September Dawn Bottoms
Image by September Dawn Bottoms
September Dawn Bottoms is on a mission. Not so much to change anyone’s life, though that would be great, she says, but to validate her own. To be heard. To heal.
She’s thirty-one years old, stands at five feet, two, and is an arresting young woman. Her fair and freckled skin still has its youthful sheen, and her sunny red hair, tied in a braid, is there for one reason: to enhance the color of her green-blue eyes. She has the kind of voice that when she speaks, you know instantly that she’s also a singer. She’s equally polite, probing, thoughtful, and profoundly poetic, but also courageous as she traced and retraced a painful past. And sometimes, when she’s feeling low, she throws cherries into the sky and takes pictures so she can see something beautiful.
You may recognize September’s name as one of three Leica Women Foto Project (LWFP) grant winners in 2022, alongside Rosem Morten and Rania Matar. Her deeply personal project, Remember September, was a photographic meditation on the trauma of the physical and sexual abuse she suffered growing up. Her work caught the attention of photo editors as early as 2019 and has since earned her multiple awards: a New York Times Fellowship 2020-21, recognition in TIME’s 2020 Best Portraits, Top 100 Photos, and Best Photojournalism categories. She has appeared on BuzzFeed’s “15 Photographers That You Should Follow Immediately” and Artsy’s “20 Rising Female Photojour-nalists.” Her images have been published in the New York Times, TIME magazine, and many other publications. An auspicious start for a self-taught young photographer at the beginning of her career. Yet September’s journey, impressive as it is, has been anything but a fairy tale.
I drove from Dallas on a chilly January day, through the land of the Muscogee Creek Nation to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to interview her for Viewfinder. We met at a coffee shop; I presumed because it was a safe place to meet a stranger. Later she welcomed me into her home, a bungalow built in the early 1900s. It was filled with comfortable, lived-in furniture, plants, antiques, and keep-sakes that ranged from the sentimental to the morose. Hand cut paper snowflakes dangled from the ceiling. Paintings and other art pieces hung conspicuously on walls. The smell of in-cense hung in the air. We sat at a table that belonged to her great-grandmother, where she remembered making fresh bis-cuits when she was young, to talk about her life, her work and forthcoming book.
I didn’t expect September to speak so openly about growing up in the shadow of abuse, with a mother who neglected her children, or in a house where sexual abuse and mental illness had quietly followed her family for generations. At times she became emotional and paused at the edge of her pain as if she were about to jump off a cliff. But she jumped anyway.
The more I learned about September, the more impossible it was to imagine her mother warning her to lock the bedroom door to keep out her groping grandfather. I wondered how anyone, especially her mother – who was also molested by her father from the age of two until she married – did nothing more to protect her daughter. I questioned their complicated, unbreakable bond, and how seemingly toxic it appeared.
Her abuse began around the time she was eight or nine years old, perpetrated by her grandfather and her babysitters, some of whom were related to her. She was physically abused and neglected by her parents. I asked if she lived every day in fear of being harmed, but surprisingly, she said no. She was a people pleaser, she told me, looking for love and acceptance, and so it was all normal behavior to her. Not until she entered middle school and told her friends about something that had happened, did she come to understand that something wasn’t normal, that something was terribly wrong.
After high school, she moved to Los Angeles with her moth-er and stepfather, a military man (one of several husbands her mother married). With no aspirations for college, she worked as a waitress and carried the weight of her past. For the next ten years, she lived an untethered life. Drugs, depression, and a debilitating aimlessness drove her deeper into hopelessness until she reached a breaking point. “It had gotten so bad that I had real thoughts of suicide; I even planned it,” she said. “I was going to ride my bike into traffic so it would look like an accident.”
Images of September Dawn Bottoms by Richard Rejino
TURNING POINT
September might have followed through on her plan were it not for an ex-boyfriend. He was in college studying to become an animation artist and called to say he had finally found what he wanted to do with his life. “He was so excited, and he sounded so happy,” she said. “It made me want to try one more time to find something, anything, that I could be great at before leaving this world.”
As happenstance would have it, she had always been drawn to photography and was constantly taking pictures with her phone. So, in 2016 she decided to enroll in a college photography course. She saved her money, sold the bike, and bought a camera. Then, on a whim, she asked one of her regulars at the coffee shop where she worked if she could interview and photograph him for a story. The thrill of the experience was like stepping into the sun. She couldn’t believe that someone would share details about their life with her. “It made me feel special, like I was good at something, and I had never felt like I was very good at any-thing,” she said. “In that moment, it made me feel that there was a possibility that I could be great at this. It felt real and whole, and I could reach out and grab it.”
'So, photography saved your life,’ I exclaimed. “Yes,” she said, as she reached to touch the camera next to her.
From there things moved quickly. She studied photography on her own and later enrolled in a masterclass with James Estrin, founder of the NY Times Photo Lens Blog, who recognized her talent and became her mentor. Under him she started a person-al project that eventually became “Remember September.” Then in 2019, she moved back to Oklahoma to confront her family to try and understand what had happened to her and why. The result was an unflinching, bare-all body of work that won her the LWFP grant.
September acknowledges that she has found a small measure of catharsis in her project. After almost six years, she says she is just now on the cusp of beginning to heal. She has re-established relationships with her mother, grandparents, brothers, and other members of her family. Her brother revealed that he was also abused when he was a boy, which sent shockwaves through her. At every step, she documented her journey and treasures the connections she made, as difficult and painful as they often were. Even when the images weren’t what she had hoped for, she knew that in the wake of confronting her perpetrators and their victims, it was the right thing to do.
“In that moment, it made me feel that there was a possibility that I could be great at this (photography). It felt real and whole, and I could reach out and grab it.”
Images by September Dawn Bottoms
BLOOD STRANGERS
Since the LWFP grant, her project has evolved into a book, Blood Strangers. The new title was inspired by a poem she wrote about the father she barely knows and the distance that exists between her relatives and her. But at the heart of this multi-layered journey is the relationship with her mother. It underscores her need to be heard. “Everything I do or ever will do is because of my mother,” she has said. Yet, September isn’t interested in laying blame, despite what her mother didn’t do to protect her. She writes in the introduction of the book:
I have a knot in the pit of my stomach. It smolders my insides and drags me down everywhere I go. It singes every relationship I have. It coils, chokes, and chars my ability to function. I’d like to blame it on my mother. The woman who didn’t care about my well-being. The woman who let me get hurt over and over again. But I know all of the responsibility of my pain, of my knot, doesn’t fall on her shoulders.
A knot burns deep in her, too.
The knot inside them is the knot of abuse from the same man, the knot of parental neglect, from knowing that love meant tak-ing something from you. It’s the knot of not being seen; of not knowing how to be the person you want to be.
Being seen and understood were constant themes that kept coming up during our interview. In one of the most poignant moments of her story, September recalled the day she confronted her mother about the truth of what happened. The two of them were having drinks to help unwind after a difficult day. “We were dancing and having a really beautiful moment,” she told me. “Suddenly, my mother burst into tears and started talking about things she never told me (about her own abuse). Then she said, ‘At least I was able to protect you guys.’”
September knew this was it. After waiting all her life for the right time to tell her mother the truth, the moment had finally arrived. The camera was a buffer to help her say what she needed to say. Later, September wrote about the exchange in this way:
I handed you the camera. The only thing to do was to say it out loud. I told you we were molested too. You handed me the camera. You said you were sorry, and we never talked about it again. You always say you don’t remember. But we (September and her brother) remember. Neither one of us is as saved as we’d like to be.
I handed you the camera. The only thing to do was to say it out loud. I told you we were molested too. You handed me the camera. You said you were sorry, and we never talked about it again. You always say you don’t remember. But we (September and her brother) remember. Neither one of us is as saved as we’d like to be.
With Blood Strangers nearly finished, September understands there is still work left to be done. “It will never be finished, but there is enough that can be contextualized and make sense and be a full narrative that can be seen by the world. And where I can be seen and understood.”
Images by September Dawn Bottoms
FACING THE SUN
After spending several intense hours together, we needed a break. We decided to go for a hike in the Oxley Nature Center, a place she often goes when she needs to think. When we arrived, it was obvious she knew the trail like the back of her hand because I would have never found my way out had she abandoned me. She strode through the trees and undergrowth that were shades of winter brown, steadfastly and with the stealth of a tracker. I tried to keep up with her and not sound out of breath. There were deer everywhere, passing by, grazing, and just being themselves, and I would have missed half of them had she not pointed them out. We talked about each other’s families. She told me more about her brothers, and how they were plagued with emotional problems whose root cause they all shared. The brother who was also molested doesn’t like being around people and lives alone and takes care of their grandparents. The other one she avoids altogether out of genuine fear. I felt guilty talking about my fam-ily who in comparison sounded like the Cleavers. We were still getting to know each other, but with each hour I was becoming more astonished by the person in front of me.
““I think every great artist should document themselves and their life. I think it brings an honesty to the rest of your work that could potentially be missing.””
It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the tragedy of September’s story. What I found most compelling, though, was her shear bravery to leave no heavy stone unturned as she wrestled with the truth about her family. I kept asking myself why she was the chosen one to cut open the wounds again and again, to try to make sense of her life, and by extension her family’s life. Then I remembered that she said she didn’t have a choice, that she was compelled to come home. Later, as I looked over the pages of notes I took and listened to the hours of recordings filled with her beautiful voice, there was something else. I remembered an Instagram post she made in 2021. She was visiting her dying Papa, her step-grandfa-ther who had been kind to her. He was quite ill and just wanted to die. She wrote that sometimes she had to leave the house to be alone, to cry, but never in front of anyone. Th en in a moment of love and hope she wrote: “I still wear pretty dresses and turn my face toward the sun.”
MOVING FORWARD
In the British Journal of Photography earlier this year, September was quoted as saying “I think every great artist should document themselves and their life. I think it brings an honesty to the rest of your work that could potentially be missing.” Even though she began Blood Strangers to help her understand her family, the project goes well beyond her own self-interests. She wants to know if turning the camera on yourself and your family can help others, or at the very least, encourage us to look at ourselves with honesty and clarity. I believe she knows the answer but needs time to realize it.
As for photography, there is nowhere else her heart lies. September Dawn Bottoms simply wants to be great, something she repeated to me several times. She is committed to telling stories, great stories, with the same honesty with which she tells her own. She wants her images to penetrate people and make them feel something deeper than just shock value. She wants to help those who are working through their own traumatic experiences and show them how the camera and writing can be therapeutic. September is self-aware enough to recognize that her dreams smack of youthful innocence, but “If I can do all that,” she says, “I’ll be alright.”
In the end, hope and purpose are the bridge between surviving and healing. September still fi ghts to untie that knot in her stomach every day and it’s a constant battle. On top of the emotional scars of her abuse are the challenges of being a free-lance photographer. It can be feast or famine, and one can never rest. More than anything, though, she’s determined to fi nd passion and honesty in everything she does. Th e camera is her talisman. With it, she will always throw cherries into the sky and turn her face towards the sun.
Richard Rejino is the Executive Director for Leica Society International. A writer, photographer and musician based in Dallas, Texas, he is the author of What Music Means to Me.
