The Long Confidence

In “The Long Confidence,” I reconfigure found images of women from antiquity to pop culture into layered photographic tableaux and self-portraits, exploring the tension between empowerment and subjugation.

In my studio practice, found images serve as inspiration and material for my photographic work. I gather images of women from antiquity to popular culture, searching for visual relationships that explore gender, power, and beauty that have resonated across centuries.

My work samples are from "The Long Confidence," my project in which I cull through art-historical, fashion, commercial, and vernacular images to make photographs that restage male-authored pictures of women. In some of these photographs, I arrange found images into sculptural tableaux for the camera, using studio lights to emphasize connections between disparate figures. For example, the photo 'Women on a Blue Background' is titled after a Fernand Léger painting, which appears near the center-left of my composition. The Léger painting depicts two gymnasts supporting one another, and I was drawn to the tension in their touch– is it aggressive or tender? Drawing from Léger's palette and pose, I constructed a photographic tableau that positions images of women in struggle or embrace.

The tableau includes images of Amazon warriors, a Helmut Newton fashion editorial 'catfight' between Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen, Egyptian mourners, 'Real Housewives of New York,' and Guy Bourdin models in an intimate pose, all scattered around the titular Léger. Formal cues unite these images, blurring the lines between compassion and combat. More broadly, each tableau interrogates inherent hierarchies between art, commercialism, fashion, and pornography, emphasizing ways women's bodies are aestheticized, controlled, and censored across media.

In parallel, I create self-portraits that extend this critical dialogue, positioning my own body in conversation with the image-dense tableaux. In these self-portraits, As a young woman, I was drawn to the dreamy, fantastical images of Man Ray and Paul Outerbridge—pictures that shaped me both as a maker and as a subject. Retrospectively, I see these images as objectifying and, at times, violent. In my photographs, I place male-authored images in dialogue with my own body, re-performing and intervening in these historical photographs to complicate their original power dynamics.

For example, in 'Spirit Rising out of Matter (after Outerbridge),' I replaced the classical bust in Paul Outerbridge's photograph with a mirror, reflecting the camera's eye back to the viewer. By making physical interventions to the male-authored works, the photographs examine the act of looking, as a lens returns the viewer's gaze or a constructed set signals an awareness of performance. Across both the tableaux and self-portraits, my work explores the slippage between empowerment and subjugation, questioning who controls the image and how it is seen.