Morgan Levy

Spark of a Nail is a photographic collaboration with women and non-binary people working and training in the building trades. Combining staging, performance, and documentary strategies, the work constructs a visual language that depicts tradespeople shaping and transforming space of their own volition—building, pausing, gathering—forming a choreography that resists dominant narratives of building and construction in photographic history.

Made in training programs and job sites across the United States, the images foreground moments of collective action, vulnerability, humor, and rest to propose a speculative space in which women and non-binary people shape environments on their own terms. In dialogue with both 20th-century labor photography and feminist image-making of the 1970s and 1980s, the project draws on and subverts elements of these visual histories to respond to persistent exclusions.

Amid a hostile political landscape in the United States for marginalized groups, Spark of a Nail proposes the building site as a place of transformation, both in the literal sense as well as in the cultural imagination, using photography’s generative potential to visualize alternative futures.