Calling the Birds Home

A profoundly intimate portrait of love and loss — a daughter’s luminous dialogue with her mother as memory fades but tenderness endures.

Calling the Birds Home by Cheryle St. Onge is an intimate meditation on memory, nature, and loss. Born from the experience of her mother’s illness and death, the work delicately traces the shifting roles of mother and daughter, transforming the act of caregiving into a poetic dialogue with the landscape. Through luminous, contemplative photographs, St. Onge captures the rhythms of waiting, the textures of daily life, and the fleeting presence of light and nature as signs of continuity. Her writing and images move between fragility and resilience, evoking how love and grief shape our perception of the world. Designed by Teresa Piardi (Maxwell Studio) and published by L’Artiere, the book is both elegy and renewal—a tender testament to the enduring ties between generations and the quiet power of photography to keep what is gone within reach.

Cheryle St. Onge was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She grew up on college campuses as the the only child of a Physics professor and a painter. She received an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts.

St. Onge's work focus on the the crossover of art and science and photography's abilty to distill our sense of time and curiosity. She makes pictures predominantly with an 8 x 10 view camera and considers her work a collaborative process.

Her photographs have been widely exhibited, most notably at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Princeton University, Griffin Museum, University of Rhode Island, Massachusetts College of Art, Rick Wester Fine Arts, and with the American Institute of Architects traveling exhibition. She has received numerous awards and residences, among them a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Critical Mass Finalist Exhibition Award, Polaroid Materials Artist Support Grant, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Graduate Fellowship, and was named one of the ‘Top 50 Photographers’ in the country by Time Magazine.

Her photographs are in many private and public collections, including the the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cassilhaus Collection, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Her work has been widely published, including features in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Photograph Magazine, Vice, Time Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, and Oxford American.

She been on the faculty at Phillips Exeter Academy, Clark University, Maine College of Art, and the University of New Hampshire. Ms. St. Onge created and taught the University of New Hampshires's Art and Art History Dept's first online curriculum beginning in 2011. She divides her time between Durham, New Hampshire and coastal Maine.