It takes only a few minutes to process a roll of black-and-white film in a darkroom. But a decade had to pass before Daydrielane Osorio could process the death of her sister, Rhoda Graham — enough distance to focus her art on the disease that took Rhoda’s life at age 20.
“It took me 10 years to get to this project,” the 39-year-old artist says of her photography collection, “Conquering SCD: Portraits of Individuals Living with SCD,” dedicated to sickle cell disease. Afflicting primarily Black people, the blood disorder killed her sister in 2008.
“I’m hoping that my art can bring exposure through those 10 pieces of work,” Osorio says, referring to the subjects who appear in her Rhoda Graham Sickle Cell Project, which she continues to work on in her Greer studio, Daydream Land Photography.
Osorio was born and reared in Kingston, Jamaica. The Caribbean island’s distinctive lilt comes through her voice — at least, when she’s not stopping for a good, long laugh, which she does especially when she’s talking about her art.
“I get a high from it,” she says. “I love people and I love the immediacy of being able to capture these nuances and idiosyncrasies of people and their heart, that I can’t get with a painting or that I can’t really do with words.”
She credits her artistic bent to her aunt, Millicent Graham, who took her teenage niece to poetry readings and workshops in the Jamaican capital. Osorio soon found herself in the company of Wayne Brown, the award-winning Trinidadian poet and writer who once edited works of the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Wolcott.
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After graduating from high school at 16, Osorio started working in downtown Kingston at Chuck’s Photo Studio, which her father owned at the time. (Her parents, Norman and Pamela Graham, now live in Taylors.)
She’s as passionate about taking pictures as she is about watching prints emerge in their chemical baths: “I learned through the darkroom and I just fell in love in the darkroom. It’s just magical, it’s just special to create something and see it come to life in front of you.”
In 2002, she attended Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts, where she was encouraged to pursue her studies in the States.
“The director of the program, he’s like, ‘You need to go to Bennington, it’s the place for you for art or photography.’ I just thought that was the perfect place for me,” she says of the Vermont college.
There, she learned some complex and painstaking print-making techniques. She also met Lucas Osorio. On their fifth wedding anniversary, in 2013, the couple moved to Greenville after researching places they wanted to make their home.
Two years ago, she won a Metropolitan Arts Council grant. A resident artist at the Greer Center for the Arts, she debuted her SCD collection in a solo exhibition at Greer City Hall from Feb. 4 through March 16, just as the pandemic hit.
A full-time mom with three children under age 5, she manages to keep up her arts studies. For the past six years, she has been a protégé of Sandy King, a widely published practitioner of the exacting carbon transfer technique.
“She’s one of my best carbon-transfer students, and it’s nice because she’s local, too,” says the retired Clemson professor.
While King no longer conducts workshops, he still welcomes Osorio once a week or so to his home studio.
“I think she’s got a lot of potential,” he says. “She’s just very interested and devoted to the work, which is the main thing. She takes it seriously, whatever she’s doing.”
An essay tribute to her sister
“I heard the dreadful moans of little sis, begging to die and asking God why: What had she done to deserve the crippling pain that glued her to the couch all night, all day, her skin pale and ashen, her palms white as cooked chicken breasts. …”
“The nurse who came from the clinic in the white mini-bus spent all the morning peeling her from the curtains as she trembled, drenched in tears. She was too tired to fight …”
By Daydrielane Osorio, published in a Jamaican literary magazine, April 2006
