I'm Mariah Maddox
a visual storyteller
Getting behind the camera felt natural for me. As a visual storyteller, I study people and capture them in their rawest moments, in their most glorious forms. What I do is more than work. It's creating experiences that expands people’s horizons and connects them with a world that they may be unfamiliar with. It's capturing feelings and thoughts that are often too hard or too heavy to put into words.
Art is how I communicate. It is how I understand the languages I do not know. It is how I connect and create harmony. So as a visual storyteller, I use my work to do just that. I feel. I teach. I learn. I bridge the gaps that exist within this world.
Sometimes I feel like holding a camera is as vulnerable as it gets. People allow you to see into their insecurities, their flaws. And somehow, your own tend to also be unveiled in the process. This craft is a way of translating the world around me. To capture stories through visuals, I’m finding, is a large part of me—and yet, there’s so much more.
For me, it's all about capturing and archiving our stories, because they matter.
I first found my interest in photos when my mother used to pull out her old shoeboxes full of captured stills. This was our love language, a favorite pastime that we share to this day. Dusting off the boxes, fingers rummaging through memories, smiles creeping across our faces as we reveled in each moment of time.
And then I picked up a camera. That moment was when I truly fell in love with the world around me. The camera became what translated every language that was foreign to me, or misunderstood. I became the studier of my surroundings, of human emotion and behavior. I deem myself honored to carry the weight of such a gift. The visual medium is how I ground myself with the Earth. It is how I create harmony where dissonance exists. I think about the stories that I am weaving for my children, my grandchildren, and every generation that will rise up beneath me. One day, all they'll have are my photographs to tell them stories of the woman I existed as, and I hope through those alone, they will know all my grit and all my glory.
All branding photos by Eden Photo.