Anastasia Sierra: The Witching Hour

In The Witching Hour, photographer Anastasia Sierra invites us into the intimate, often overlooked space where caregiving, exhaustion, and quiet strength converge. Named winner of the August 2025 Solo Exhibition on All About Photo and handpicked by guest curator Ann Jastrab, Executive Director of the Center for Photographic Art, this emotionally resonant series transcends traditional portraiture to explore the psychological weight of motherhood and familial responsibility.

Sierra began the series during a time of deep personal shift. “I become a mother and stop sleeping through the night,” she recalls. “Years go by, the child sleeps soundly in his bed but I still wake at every noise. My father comes to live with us and all of a sudden I am a mother to everyone.” These lived experiences shape the narrative thread running through the work: love tangled with fatigue, duty colored by dread, and moments of surreal quiet that hover between dreams and wakefulness.

Each photograph in The Witching Hour feels suspended in time—domestic yet uncanny, grounded yet otherworldly. The saturated tones and theatrical lighting frame gestures and glances with cinematic intensity. Sierra doesn’t just document caregiving; she evokes its emotional texture: the fear of what could happen, the persistence of what must be done, and the strange beauty of doing it alone in the quiet dark.

More than a series about motherhood, The Witching Hour is a meditation on presence—the kind of unspoken, invisible presence that defines those who care for others. It’s about the stillness of 3 a.m., the emotional echoes in the hallways of a house, and the transformation of self that often goes unseen.

Sierra’s work offers no easy resolution, only the powerful suggestion that within the surreal, there is truth—and within the daily rituals of care, an extraordinary kind of grace.