I am an active and successful freelance photographer, teacher and parent, with over 30 years’ commercial photographic experience. I specialize in editorial, travel and portrait photography, but approach all of these idioms from a common perspective, one which is still very much informed by my college studies.
My photographic career has encompassed editorial photography for a range of national and regional clients, including Rolling Stone, American Rowing, and Men’s Health magazines, while my corporate and nonprofit assignments have included: Nautica, Bowdoin College, Wesleyan University, George Washington University and Children's House Montessori. I exhibit and publish nationally and internationally, and have received numerous awards, including several recent Honorable Mentions at the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. I travel widely for work within and outside the US and I am comfortable working in a wide range of cultures, contexts and settings. I am currently working on a forthcoming exhibition at Maine Museum of Photographic Arts and accompanying publication.
My career began with editorial work but has increasingly focused on portraiture and events of all kinds, approached via a style of photography I call Fine Art Photojournalism. My photographic practice, whilst very much rooted in ‘real world’ settings, in which successful collaboration with sitters and clients is absolutely critical, is still very much informed at a fundamental level by my education as a fine-art photographer and the way in which this has shaped my ‘eye’.
I now recognize that I make my work out of multiple forms of necessity. I take photographs as much for my mental health as for financial reasons, as doing so acts as a form of therapy for me, and allows me to contribute to the richness of society. My work aims to cause viewers to question themselves and others more deeply. I am particularly drawn to photographing women, so as to capture, examine and celebrate the diversity of their life experiences. Choosing this as the focus of my research project will allow me to finally engage with a topic that has been the undercurrent of the majority of my life’s work. Thoughts about what it means to become, be and be perceived as a woman inform the way I think, speak and center myself every day.
My desire to participate in your program is driven by a need for an artistic community which will hold me accountable for creating new work, challenge me about its content and allow me to engage other artists and teachers in discussion. At the conclusion of the program, I hope to gain a cleaner and more continuous flow of ideas into art, and to consistently begin bodies of work with a clearer sense of what needs to be made, and have each sequential piece dig still deeper into the purpose of that project. I look forward to being part of a greater community of artists and also plan on using the degree to teach in higher education.
PHD RESEARCH PROPOSAL
1. Project working title: Mothers of Invention: Seeing women anew in American vernacular and fine art photography.
2. Research project aims and questions.
What do the portraits that I take of women capture and reveal about what it means to become, be and be perceived as a person who identifies as a woman, and why does the process of sitting for me for a shoot so often seem to result in improved confidence and wellbeing for the sitter?
How can a re-consideration of the respective potentials of American vernacular and fine art photographic portraiture to create individual and/or collective meaning problematize their perceived relative cultural values as artforms?
How can the re-consideration and re-presentation of photographic images of women made by women in an installative context which explores the possibilities of photography as an
‘expanded field’ of practice (after Rosalind Krauss,1979, and George Baker, 2005), shed new light on their individual and collective meaning and significance?
3. Project/goals.
I want to understand what my process of making portraits of women captures and reveals about what it means to become, be and be perceived as a person who identifies as a woman, and how this process sits within the related cultural and creative contexts of American vernacular and fine art photographic portraiture? I also want to explore what can be revealed about these ways of making images by exploring more installative (or expanded) methods of creating and/or re-presenting the images of women that I create.
4. Contextual/Literature review.
My first camera was given to me by my mother when I was seven years old. I rapidly moved on to a 110 cartridge camera, and then graduated to a seemingly indestructible Pentax K1000 in high school. When I got the SLR I began doing my own developing and processing, aided and abetted by my photographically-inclined track coach and my art teacher, who secretly took a night class in photography in order to be better able to support my endeavors, as I was to find out many years later.
I graduated from my MFA in photography with a child on my hip, who immediately grabbed my graduation certificate in her chubby hand and tossed it to the floor when I received it. So upon leaving college, using my photographic skills to earn a living became an absolute necessity, as it was the only available option to put bread on the table. I have continued to do so since 1993, and have raised two children while working continuously as a commercial photographer.
While I received a fine art photographic training, I am very much a vernacular photographer by trade and necessity, per the definition supplied by MOMA, which situates the vernacular as “an umbrella term used to distinguish fine art photographs from those made for a huge range of purposes, including commercial, scientific, forensic, governmental, and personal.” Over the past 30 years I have become well-known throughout my community as an experienced, reliable and competent photographer, for whom many of my subjects seem to really enjoy sitting. Despite my education and experience, it still seems difficult to transcend the identity that the work that I do has created for me. I am known, albeit affectionately, amongst my friends, some of whom are fine art photographers of some reputation (such as Paul Caponigro and his son, John-Paul Caponigro) as ‘the Wedding Photographer’.
Yet there is so much more to what I do than this: as a woman who takes photographs of women, I am often painfully aware of the difference in the levels of confidence in self-image when a woman sits for me as opposed to when a man does, because of this, I have come to realize that I am much more drawn to photographing women than men. Through the skills I have developed over the course of my photographic career, I can help them realize their own power by the way I make each image. In this situation I simultaneously become the woman’s confidante, therapist, cheerleader and coach, as I want to ensure that she feels happy, confident and able to take ownership of her manifestation in my camera. So, for me, portrait photography is also a form of social practice, and one which in some way seeks to undo the damage done to women by what Laura Mulvey termed ‘the Male Gaze’ in 1973.
I learned a great deal about this process of giving ease and comfort when I worked as an assistant to photographer Joyce Tenneson, however a key difference between our ways of working is that many of Joyce’s fine art photographs are intentionally portraits of the artist rather than the sitter, whereas the sense that I have of my own practice is that my fullest intention is to facilitate the appearance of my subject as whoever they feel is their truest self at the moment of capture. Another key influence for me is Sally Mann, who has similarly spent much of her career photographing her children, as I have done, and yet, despite the obvious similarities in our practices, somehow it still feels to me that our works take place in different worlds, for reasons that I do not fully understand. These thoughts open up for me questions of how it’s possible to belong and yet still not feel like you belong, as a woman, and as a woman photographer, and why is it that certain ways of making (a living from) photographs are still devalued or overlooked?
The background to all of these questions lies in American portrait photography, both within the fine art and vernacular traditions, and in the consideration of the photographers who have worked within and across these areas, such as Annie Leibovitz, Robert Maplethorpe, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, amongst many others. Focusing on portraiture of women will allow me to explore and understand the different ways in which it functions in relation to both fine art and vernacular photography. I use the term ‘fine art photojournalism’ to describe my photographic approach to potential clients and sitters, in order to encapsulate the desire to have each photograph function as a compositionally rigorous image that can stand on its own merits, as well as playing its part in unfolding the narrative of the event I’m shooting.
As part of this project, I hope to reveal something unexpected about the way in which images drawn from vernacular photography can function by exploring their theoretical and curatorialrecontextualisation. George Baker’s mapping out of an Expanded Field for photography in 2005, by building upon Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay of 1979 will be of importance here, in relation to navigating the theoretical aspects of locating and re-situating my own practice. In curatorial terms I intend to do this by exploring the re-presentation and recontextualization of the images that I make within overtly installative modes of presentation, such as by means of large-scale public projection (per the recent work of Basharat Khan).
Motherhood is what got in the way of my pursuing a fine art career directly out of school, and yet, somewhat ironically, motherhood is what I always thought might create my fine art career, with much of my artistic work centered around documenting my children’s lives. Motherhood is also one of the main reasons that men do not take women seriously, which is yet another delicious irony, because giving birth is one of the most difficult and powerful things a human can do.
5. Methods.
My methods will include: taking photographs, reflecting upon and contextualizing my practice using a diverse range of sources, and experimenting with new ways of displaying and reconfiguring them which reference (and question) Baker’s diagram of an Expanded Field of
(Fine Art) photography.
6. Proposed timeline/structure of project
Year 1:
Proposal revisions.
Program Approval process.
Research Ethics approval process (if required).
Production of literature and contextual review.
Articulation of methods and methodology.
Initial practice explorations.
Year 2:
Confirmation of Registration process.
Further development of practice components.
Experimentation with more installative methods of presentation.
Begin written thesis.
Year 3:
Final creation and installation of work.
Submission of written thesis.
Viva voce examination.
7. Indicative Bibliography
Baker, George, (2005), “Photography’s Expanded Field”. October 114, (Fall 2005), pp. 120 -140. Broad, Norma and Garrard, Mary, (1994), The Power of Feminist Art, Abrams.
Chicago, Judy, (2007), Becoming Judy Chicago. MMIZOO.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, (1992), Women Who Run With the Wolves, Ballentine Books.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, (2011), Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul. Sounds True Country.
Gardner, Howard, (2006), Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds, Harvard Business Review Press.
Gosling, Lucinda, Robinson, Hilary and Tobin, Amy, (2018), The Art of Feminism, Chronicle Books, hooks, bell (2004), Feminist Theory. Routledge.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44. Kruger, Barbara, (2010), Barbara Kruger. Rizzoli.
Schneemann, Carolee, (2008), Split Decision. CEPA Gallery.
Tenneson, Joyce, (1994) Transformations. Bulfinch Press.
Wolf, Sylvia, (1994), FOCUS: Five Women Photographers. Albert Whitman & Co.