The Long Confidence
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Dates2021 - Ongoing
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Author
In "The Long Confidence," I restage male-authored pictures of women, from art history to pornography. The lens looks back, the set admits it’s a performance, and the question is who controls the image.
The pictures that first taught me how to make photographs were mostly made by men. The Long Confidence is my response: a series of constructed photographs that restage how women have been pictured, from antiquity to pop culture, and ask who controls the image.
I work in two forms. In the tableaux, I gather found images from art history, fashion, advertising, and vernacular sources and arrange them into sculptural sets, lit and rephotographed as a single image. Each is titled after a central artwork that sets the palette and pose. Women on a Blue Background takes its name from a Fernand Léger painting of two gymnasts supporting one another. I was drawn to the tension in their touch: is it aggressive or tender? Around the Léger I placed Amazon warriors, a Helmut Newton “catfight” between Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen, Egyptian mourners, the Real Housewives of New York, and Guy Bourdin models in an intimate pose. Formal echoes hold them together, and compassion and combat blur. Across the series, the tableaux flatten the hierarchy between art, fashion, commerce, and pornography, and show how women’s bodies are aestheticized, controlled, and censored across all of them.
In the self-portraits, I put my own body in the picture. As a young woman, I was drawn to the dreamy, fantastical photographs of Man Ray and Paul Outerbridge, images that shaped me as both a maker and a subject. Now I read them as objectifying and, at times, violent. I rebuild these photographs and intervene in them. In Spirit Rising out of Matter (after Outerbridge), I replaced the classical bust with a mirror, so the camera’s eye returns to the viewer.
In both forms, the work lives in the slippage between empowerment and subjugation, and in the act of looking itself: a lens that looks back, a set that admits it is a performance.
