Invisible Selves--Exploring Female Identity and Experience
20 images Created 29 Mar 2015
Invisible Selves--An Exploration of Female Identity and Experience
Since my early days as a young girl growing up in South Africa, I seemed to be drawn to photo- graphing women. Perhaps, because I was female, their lives were more accessible to me, and more relevant. In search of my own identity and place in society, looking through a camera at the lives of other women helped me navigate my way into adulthood and shaped my perception of the world and all its complexities. As I advanced in my photography career, I found myself frequently amazed and frustrated by the plight of so many women I ran into as I worked on projects in India, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, The United States etc.
Over the past 14 or so years working as a photographer, I have been engaged in projects centered on women and women’s issues. Among the women I’ve photographed is a Tanzanian women who is being housed in a protective home after villagers accused her of witchcraft and cut off one of her hands, a Zanzibarian women who is involved in a program that teaches women how to cultivate shellfish as an alternative form of protein, an American woman the day before she had a mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time, two Indian teenage-girls playing a spinning game in a rescue center after being "rescued" from a brothel and a 105 year-old Cape Verdean-American woman who remains the powerful matri- arch of her family.
My project, “Invisible Selves”, which is a collection of images created over the course of my career, is an exploration of female identity and experience in our present day. Women have long sought self-definition and yet are daily confronted with the limitations of their own lives and media images that contradict their experiences and seek to define them. How others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves too, are often so incongruent. We all struggle with the roles meted out by the particular society we live in--the expectation of motherhood, ideas about how we should behave, how we should look, what we should achieve and whether we are valuable. With the portraits of women in this collection I hope to present a diverse and striking range of images of women in a multiplicity of cultural contexts that will stimulate dialog about female identity and experience across cultures. I also hope these images provoke questions in the viewer about their own assumptions and the societal influences that inform these assumptions.
The photographs are printed on a relatively large scale (24”x 36” and 16”x 24”) on an alu- minum surface. The aluminum surface lends the images an extraordinarily vibrant and almost life-like appearance. The intent behind this is to create the effect of the women being present in the gallery space, as if to participate in the show and give voice to their own experiences.
Since my early days as a young girl growing up in South Africa, I seemed to be drawn to photo- graphing women. Perhaps, because I was female, their lives were more accessible to me, and more relevant. In search of my own identity and place in society, looking through a camera at the lives of other women helped me navigate my way into adulthood and shaped my perception of the world and all its complexities. As I advanced in my photography career, I found myself frequently amazed and frustrated by the plight of so many women I ran into as I worked on projects in India, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, The United States etc.
Over the past 14 or so years working as a photographer, I have been engaged in projects centered on women and women’s issues. Among the women I’ve photographed is a Tanzanian women who is being housed in a protective home after villagers accused her of witchcraft and cut off one of her hands, a Zanzibarian women who is involved in a program that teaches women how to cultivate shellfish as an alternative form of protein, an American woman the day before she had a mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time, two Indian teenage-girls playing a spinning game in a rescue center after being "rescued" from a brothel and a 105 year-old Cape Verdean-American woman who remains the powerful matri- arch of her family.
My project, “Invisible Selves”, which is a collection of images created over the course of my career, is an exploration of female identity and experience in our present day. Women have long sought self-definition and yet are daily confronted with the limitations of their own lives and media images that contradict their experiences and seek to define them. How others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves too, are often so incongruent. We all struggle with the roles meted out by the particular society we live in--the expectation of motherhood, ideas about how we should behave, how we should look, what we should achieve and whether we are valuable. With the portraits of women in this collection I hope to present a diverse and striking range of images of women in a multiplicity of cultural contexts that will stimulate dialog about female identity and experience across cultures. I also hope these images provoke questions in the viewer about their own assumptions and the societal influences that inform these assumptions.
The photographs are printed on a relatively large scale (24”x 36” and 16”x 24”) on an alu- minum surface. The aluminum surface lends the images an extraordinarily vibrant and almost life-like appearance. The intent behind this is to create the effect of the women being present in the gallery space, as if to participate in the show and give voice to their own experiences.
