Ísland

Through staged encounters with men in Reykjavík, I explore intimacy, power, and desire—using the camera to reveal shifting dynamics between control and vulnerability, reclaiming agency through a female gaze that is intimate, deliberate, and assured.

For more than twenty years, I have explored issues of body image, beauty, vulnerability, and the dynamics of gender, turning the camera on myself and others to investigate the tension between private and public selves, masculinity, and the complexity of representations. Central to my practice is the psychological and physical connection forged through photographing—an act that opens space for closeness, performance, and transformation.

 My current project, Ísland, extends this inquiry through encounters with men in Reykjavík, Iceland, whom I meet on dating apps. These platforms—at once ubiquitous and transactional—have become one of the most common ways people explore sexuality and negotiate desire. What begins as a fleeting digital match evolves into a staged scenario for my camera, where power, vulnerability, and longing are challenged and redefined. Through this series of photographs, I investigate both my feminine agency and the vulnerability of my subjects, shifting dynamics of control and submission into visible performance.

The choice of Reykjavík is essential to this work. The city offers a space of freedom and openness distinct from the United States: an acceptance of the body that is less burdened by shame and a cultural embrace of sexual expression that invites experimentation. In this context, one’s sexuality feels simultaneously liberated and precarious, allowing the scenarios I create to unfold with a raw honesty that for me is difficult to access elsewhere.

Emerging from encounters that blur fact and performance, the works inhabit the space between reality and imagination, staging private exchanges as public fictions. Each photograph becomes a scenario in which intimacy is both real and theatrical, playful and empathetic. Through these encounters, I seek to imagine a shared relationship between the two of us— where male desire can be examined through the gaze of female expression—intimate yet in control, empowering my own comfort in the roles we play in front and behind the camera.

In addition to sourcing male subjects on the internet, I have begun to cast myself and other women as protagonists, opening a conversation around looking—where roles of subject and spectator are constantly shifting. Who is being seen, how is the body rendered, and who commands the gaze? The self behind the camera, often reflected in mirrors, enters as both witness and performer, asserting agency for the maker and transforming the scene into a living scenario in which sexuality, representation, the private self is exposed and brought to the surface.