From the Study on Post Pubescent Manhood

In From the Study On Post Pubescent Manhood, I go searching for displays of violence that function as catharsis in a group of young men at a dystopian compound in Southern Ohio. I became fascinated by a place that allows men to come together to act out their aggression away from the confining rules of society. These photographs culminate as an unwieldy archive. I believe that if I have enough evidence showing that violence can function as an emotional release, I can validate behavior that might at first glance seem destructive, dissolute, or dangerous.

Over the course of a decade, I have built a relationship with the men in this project, In this work I take on the role of observer, documentarian, friend, therapist, instigator, social scientist, mother, lover, and fetishist. The subjects of my photographs take on the role of performer, object of desire, interlocutor, storyteller, muse, and informant.

I am attracted to the complicated messiness of our relationship, the times in which it’s difficult to see where the performance ends and truth emerges, the glimpses of raw vulnerability where fetishization turns to humanization.

More than just immersing myself in their world and behavior, I wanted to make photographs that represented the peculiar power relationship between subject and documenter by looking at the ways that I provoked, empowered, and exploited my ‘subject’.

The work reveals myself as an artist who knowingly glorifies and fetishizes her subjects’ sexuality and youthful vitality. These images teeter on the line between pleasure and suffering, lust and adoration, friendship and fascism.

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