Photographer Shelagh Howard is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘The Secret Keepers’. To see Shelagh ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The Secret Keepers highlights the experience of intimate partner abuse through a series of 21 long exposure photographic prints, created through seven distinct stages of editing, printing, reworking and reprinting. Each final image is the product of an intentionally arduous process, mirroring the average of seven attempts it takes to permanently leave an abusive partner.

Every stage impacts and alters the image, permanently obliterating some details and obscuring others. Like finding a charred but still identifiable object in the wreckage of a burned house, the images bear the impact of their journey through each process and revision.

This complicated process becomes a metaphor for survival. Drawing on 175 years of photographic history, the series layers digital long exposures, wetplate tintypes, and gelatin silver prints, reflecting the deep-rooted and ongoing crisis of intimate partner violence throughout history, and it’s continued prevalence to this day.

Grounded in personal experience, it gives shape to the unseen: psychological abuse, coercive control, emotional warfare disguised as intimacy, and the quiet erosion of self.

Bringing these hidden wounds to light, The Secret Keepers is both testimony and reckoning—an invitation to witness what often remains invisible, and a plea for increased awareness, support and advocacy for those experiencing intimate partner abuse and all forms of family violence.

Exploring the threshold between beloved and abuser, safety and danger, reality and nightmares, these images hold the secrets of the epidemic of intimate partner abuse in their silent embrace.

Shelagh Howard (Canadian, b. 1971) is a photo based visual artist whose work holds space for memory, identity, and embodied experience. Utilizing long exposures and combining alternative processes with modern digital technology, she explores the construction of selfhood—interrogating themes of gender, generational trauma, vulnerability, intimacy and isolation through the expression of the human form.

With an unflinching gaze, she peels back the slick surfaces of constructed identity to reveal the rawness beneath. Her images thread motion and stillness, capturing the ephemeral shadows of the self and offering a fleeting glimpse of what lingers behind our carefully assembled facades.

Each image asks the viewer to see its subject captured outside of time, and to consider what it means to belong to and in a body.

Shelagh was born in Toronto and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She studied psychology at The University of Toronto and photography at Ryerson University, and has created and exhibited works in Canada, the US and Europe. Her portraits have been published in Songlines Magazine UK, Opera Canada, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, VICE magazine, on billboards in Times Square, NYC and Dundas Square, Toronto. Her personal work received an honorable mention at the 14th and 26th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Barcelona, Spain, and the 2021 Artist Award from the Cornell Henry Art Gallery in San Diego.