Soft Resistance: Studies in Form

  • Dates
    2019 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Locations New York, Philadelphia, Rhode Island

A study in how tenderness can hold power. Through portraiture and movement-based image-making, I explore softness as resistance; how Black bodies command space through quiet gesture, ritual, and light.

My work moves between photography and film to explore embodiment, intimacy, and the power in being tender. I’m drawn to how stillness, movement, and light can communicate presence, and how form itself becomes a kind of language. My images often use fabric, sculptural props, and pared-down environments to hold the body as both structure and feeling, revealing the subtle tensions between control and surrender.

In recent years, my practice has expanded from natural light portraiture into a self-directed studio practice that merges movement and image-making. I often collaborate with dancers, particularly through pole dance; a form I treat not only as performance, but as ritual. This work reframes the body as a site of power, tenderness, and self-possession; it resists reduction and stigma, asking viewers to witness softness as command.

Across both still and moving images, I’m developing an evolving visual series titled 8 Visual Studies in Form. It’s not a single body of work, but a framework; a living study in how the body shapes and is shaped by its environment. Works like "Ornamental Quiet", "Form as a Language", "From an Ocean to a Lake", and "Sister’s Keeper" investigate presence through sculptural composition, gesture, and tone. Each piece engages Black bodies as sites of intimacy, resilience, and quiet power; showing how tenderness itself can be a form of resistance.

This grant would allow me to deepen my technical fluency and sustain my ongoing exploration of form; building new studio-based works that expand photography beyond documentation into a meditative space of self-discovery. I want to continue crafting images that hold the complexity of softness, showing how our bodies, in stillness and gesture, can command space quietly, yet vibrantly.

© Sabine Ostinvil - A rare safety; a language the world’s forgotten to teach.
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A rare safety; a language the world’s forgotten to teach.

© Sabine Ostinvil - Elle, soft strength.
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Elle, soft strength.

© Sabine Ostinvil - Presence, not performance.
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Presence, not performance.

© Sabine Ostinvil - The body remembering.
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The body remembering.

© Sabine Ostinvil - Against the tension.
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Against the tension.

© Sabine Ostinvil - A dance between the body and the Earth.
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A dance between the body and the Earth.

© Sabine Ostinvil - Communion in solitude.
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Communion in solitude.

© Sabine Ostinvil - Form as a language.
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Form as a language.

© Sabine Ostinvil - Ornamental quiet.
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Ornamental quiet.

© Sabine Ostinvil - Sister's keeper.
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Sister's keeper.

© Sabine Ostinvil - It's the little things.
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It's the little things.

© Sabine Ostinvil - A quiet kind of courage.
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A quiet kind of courage.