New Portrayal: The Unscripted Experience of Being Seen

This is New Portrayal

A body of work co-created with deconstruction worker women being ourselves, together. We’re curating new experiences with being seen, seeing, and offering a new take on the significance of image and the experience of portrayal.

I initially felt called to create images that felt like this back in my 20s and it took its slow circuitous time to happen. Any artist who excavates the depths of their curiosity can draw lines back to younger insights, to flashes of audacious images set in dream-like scenes. And then the universe conspires as it does.

These portraits were made in 2019 in Southern Utah with Molly.

It was cold and felt hurried and wild with floods of shape making and inspiration with, miraculously, no one around. There were plenty of places to go and hunker for the kind of privacy that’s sometimes needed for nudes in nature, but nature gave us a storm for privacy so we climbed up. Up through puddles, wind whipping, screaming directions and laughing,

“Are you okay?” I asked

“I’m great!” she said, and meant it.

The moody clouds in fog layers bringing their part. Wind incessant

I wore layers and a poncho, she wore nothing but water and her She-ra wildness.

I promise nothing but my time and my perspective for sessions like this. No sense in betraying what might happen in service to what we think could or should. The initial idea is a white rabbit, an invitation best taken when thanked and forgotten immediately making room for reality and opportunity as it presents this kind of perspective in this kind of moment for these kinds of photographs.

This is New Portrayal—an every-moment-unrepeatable collaboration with the raw, real, and never-again.

“This was, hands down, one of the most empowering experiences of my life.”-Molly

“I was a bit nervous leading up to and also beginning the session. A few minutes into shooting, I relaxed and knew I had made the right choice. There was no apprehension during or after my session.”

“I think self love also means giving yourself grace when you feel that you’ve made a mistake.”

“After the shoot I felt... euphoric. I was on cloud 9. I felt like I could do anything. I just did this thing that I have always been taught was taboo or shameful, yet it didn’t feel that way. I felt calm and peace knowing I had done exactly what was right and the exactly right time in my life.”

These images were made with Molly and are shared with her permission along with words about her experience.