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English Professor Stephenie A. Young, a faculty member in Salem State's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, transformed her COVID-19 pandemic experience when she developed a bond with a new friend: her Fuji X-T4 camera.

Young’s love for photography began at a young age, inspired by her photographer mother, Carol Young. While most young women would celebrate having a second bathroom growing up, Young’s household opted to adapt one bathroom into a dark room instead. Even though Young would later pursue her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, she first attended art school for photography and eventually completed her undergraduate degree in Art History.

While working on a long-term project in Bosnia for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Young—an avid traveler—made a decision to visit beautiful and exotic Georgia. After visiting a contested border space between Georgia and Azerbaijan, an idea began to form. [Since Young had been writing a paper on the U.S. and Mexico border at this time, her interest in border studies continued to grow.] Young developed a plan to take her love of photography to the Caucasus Mountains, which run through not only Russia, but also both Georgia and Azerbaijan.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted this plan and Young found herself on a new mission, learning everything she could from photography mentor, Don Toothaker, an educational director at Hunt’s Photo. With new ideas formulating in her mind, Young purchased a brand-new Fuji XT-4 and as a member of the Network of Aesthetic Ecologies based in Switzerland and Lebanon—a group of academics who are also artists—Young was invited by the University of Zurich to present her ideas of taking photography to the Caucasus.

While her project is only in the beginning stages, Young’s paper, “Worthy of a Postcard? Notes from a Journey through a Post-Soviet Landscape from the Black Sea to the Gates of Alexander” shows her plans to build a narrative using a dying art, postcards. In this postcard collection, she will incorporate self-portraits of herself in border spaces through the Caucasus.

Driven by her motivation to empower her Salem State students, Young looks forward to beginning this project, as soon as all borders open post-pandemic. Her first stop will likely be Turkey, a border that is already open. Young can’t say where this project will end; maybe the mountains of the Caucasus will simply be the first set of postcards in a longer series. Young hopes to inspire her female students to believe in themselves. She proudly models traveling alone internationally as a first generation college student.

Young advises, “People will tell you you can’t. . . you have to keep [those] voices out of your head,” as she heeds her mother’s warning: “Each year gets shorter.”