This project first arose from my own journey to heal and recreate my relationship with my body. 

As a woman, there are parts of my body that I have trouble feeling comfortable with. There are parts of my body that I have been made to feel ashamed of and have spent a large portion of my life trying to conceal or change. This is a common experience of most women and genderqueer folx that I have talked to, and it’s become such a normal experience, that we don’t even stop to question it. It’s taken me a while to realize that this is something to question and to get angry about. We have been made to feel lesser than and unbeautiful by media and advertising as if the space that we inhabit is somehow something to be ashamed of and that the only way that we can take up space is to be made into a perfect, unattainable object. 

This objectification through the media is something that men experience as well. However, for this project, I wanted to center women and genderqueer folx: identities and bodies that have historically been exploited, objectified, and profited off of. Objectification attempts to displace our bodies from natural forms and the earth. It’s a way of distancing women and genderqueer folx from ourselves, and that displacement has been internalized. In order to redefine what it means to be in our bodies and reform our perception of ourselves, we are forced to not only push back against societal objectification but against our own minds.

Any non-male bodies are objectified in the media to the point that they aren’t seen as being a part of nature. To reconcile this distance from nature and thus ourselves, I photographed different parts of women and genderqueer folx’s bodies who volunteered, and I attempted to match the photos of their bodies with photos of forms and textures that I found in nature. 

“The Earth on Our Backs” weaves bodily experience with natural forms to create a definition of beauty that is rooted in inherent power from the earth. It exposes beauty as an interplay between forms that are more similar than we might imagine. Instead of seeing ourselves in nature or seeing nature in us, we can see that nature is us and we are nature.

It is often said that fashion reflects society. Fashion can exist as a form of self expression, but it also acts as a way for people to connect with the culture during any given period of time. I have always had a love for fashion. I think back to my childhood years and remember countless days spent playing dress-up with my sisters. Our basement-runway was the closest interpretation to a fashion show we could achieve at the time, and has since become a platform which birthed my vision for this show. 

I often find myself imagining what life would have been like to live in those “good old days” we hear about in the movies. In this series, I combined my love for portrait photography with the curiosity I have for individual lives from past generations. As society has evolved through the decades, fashion has inevitably followed. Vogue Magazine has a strong influence on Evolve, as the company has been a leading force in the fashion industry for decades. I see this shift most distinctly through the evolution of societal expectations for women and the interpretive responses those standards have brought about. 

In an effort to emphasize my subjects’ expression, I chose to use a studio setup for this shoot. My hope in using this media was to center viewers’ focus on the person behind the camera. I Photoshopped the backgrounds of most images included in my show, in an attempt to mimic some of the designs displayed on Vogue Magazine covers.

I set one goal for myself: capture the change in female habits based on their interaction with fashion and the time period they lived in.

The Kuleshov Effect, first demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, is a phenomenon where an audience gathers more meaning from the juxtaposition of two sequential shots compared to a single shot alone. While this is proven to work with film, I wanted to explore this concept with combinations of colors in portrait photography.

Does the interaction of different colors change the way you perceive emotion?

I created these portraits in a lighting studio using colored gel filters, which are colored plastic sheets that cover the strobes. When I pressed the shutter of the camera, the strobes flashed causing light to travel through the gels and shine color onto the model’s face. I gave no instruction to the models on which facial expressions to use, emotions to convey or how to pose. Color theory, the science and art of how colors interact and harmonize, provided the template for deciding which colors to include in each photograph. The gels that were used consisted of orange, blue, yellow, purple and green and were paired to create contrast and enhance one another.  

As you observe, pay attention to the emotion or feeling the model conveys. This project is meant to showcase the interplay of colors and how each combination may lead to a different interpretation of the facial expressions and posture of the model. As members of a constantly evolving society, we face different combinations of colors every day. We unconsciously associate certain colors with various cultural and environmental constructs, such as red with anger and blood, and green with calmness and nature. This show is meant to expose these unconscious tendencies. Additionally, think about the skin tone of each model and how that affects your interpretations of the photographs. This experiment may provide insight into why we interpret people or situations differently depending on the colors involved.

Various media have depicted what the future could look like. Some portray it as post-apocalyptic, a dystopia, or neon noir. The latter has always been the most intriguing to me, as it gives a mysterious but technological feeling.

To create these images, I combined the photo acquisition of infrared with neon glow effects, through Adobe Photoshop. The purpose of infrared is to capture the natural light of any subject in a wavelength that is invisible to the human eye. The best time to capture infrared photos is at noon, on a sunny day in the spring or summer. The final aesthetic of each would result in monochrome, instead of color.

With the neon glow effects, learning a new technique in Photoshop was easy. I used the pen tool and set it to the color white. Next, I precisely clicked to pinpoint each corner or curve on any line that I saw. Finally, with each line finished, I set the outer glow effect to the color of my choosing, such as blue and pink. The consistency of them was important because this aesthetic was heavily inspired by the movie Blade Runner, as there was a large presence in certain scenes. Likewise, I chose the remaining colors to have a subtle presence, acting as the background. Another reason for this aesthetic came from listening to lofi music. Whenever I would listen, it would be interpreted as peaceful and calming. With the presence of these luminous lights, the monochrome aesthetic of infrared allows me to see the world as it is.