The Nature of Your Departure presents the work of four artists and current MFA candidates in Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Together, they departed normalcy when the pandemic interrupted their graduate studies and, in response, they made work about looking forward, not back. Each of their projects engages with the necessity of leaving behind the accepted – accepted understandings of culture, nature, race, gender, and family. Though working in photography, none of these artists record the world only as it is; instead they create amalgams of reality and vision. These photographic projects are quietly subversive interventions. Andriana Nativio’s black and white photographs show two young girls exploring vast forests and fields, alone and unafraid. Claude Eshun’s color photographs reveal the pressures and dreams of a black African immigrant mother and son, navigating identities and balancing precariously in white America. In Jacob Geiger’s installation, photographs of dense landscapes are projected onto fragile slices of glass, fragmenting expectations of a coherent perspective of nature. Tabitha Barnard makes color photographs challenging and embracing the tender limits of family, culture, and care. These four artists found in photography templates for departures – they created new ways of seeing to depart worn ways of being. —S. Billie Mandle, 2021