The Rage Project

"There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling." - Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic

The relationship between women and anger is a historically contentious one. See a truly angry woman and you see the sweeping of a thousand moments of repressed anger onto one face. See this and society responds with fear. Too often we are taught to sweep the mess under the rug and, rather than learning to tap into our fury, we instead learn to keep our cool. In 2016, a study* showed that it took people longer to correctly identify the gender of a female face with an expression of anger, and when correctly identified, the expression was read as more hostile than in our male counterparts. Anger, for women, carries the weight of thousands of years of misrepresentation--images of the witch, the bitch, the angry black woman, the "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

When I approach women with this project I often encounter a tentative curiosity, quickly followed by a disclaimer: I'm not good at expressing anger. I ask every woman I shoot to consider what is making them angry, how they usually express their anger, and what they feel the implications of expressing this anger are. Each photograph gives space for female embodiment of rage--for women to listen to, express, acknowledge and accept their rage--to understand that it is not destructive but productive. To capture and catalogue female rage in its many forms, in its strength, is to show that there is beauty in the mess.

In an article for the New York Times, Leslie Jamison poignantly writes, "no woman's anger is an island." The Rage Project is evidence of a collective experience of repressed anger as women. The Rage Project is an experiment of catharsis, of long overdue conversations about anger, of my own relationship with anger. Until female rage is no longer revolutionary, whether expressed in the private or public sphere, The Rage Project will continue to be necessary.

*1990 Ulf Dimberg and L.O. Lundquist psychological study