Cavarocchi, Shannon: Song for the Siren

Created in the aftermath of trauma, Song for the Siren began as a self-portrait through which Shannon Cavarocchi (b. 1997, American) sought to reconnect with her body. The work expanded into a meditation on memory, myth, and transformation. It moves between portraiture and landscape, where bodies appear and disappear within the natural world; gestures become ritual; water, stone, and skin mirror one another. The women who appear throughout are collaborators rather than subjects.

Throughout the series, Cavarocchi draws on the mythology of Sirens and Nymphs—figures historically suspended between seduction and danger, beauty and violence, freedom and projection. Rather than retelling these myths, Song for the Siren reclaims them, asking what remains when women step outside inherited narratives and begin to author their own.

Like the Siren’s call, the work offers no resolution. The photographs exist between dream and document, tenderness and unease, suggesting a cyclical return: to the body, to memory, and to one another.

The book contains a foreword written by photographer and educator Odette England (b. 1975, Australian).