Ceremony (Series), 2025
Archival inkjet prints
Slemmons collection
The Victorian photo album is a dusty, uptight coordinate in the origins of photographic portraiture: a mimicry of painting conventions turned to hall-of-mirrors self-replication, constructing a genre whose postures, spatial formulas, and materials still haunt contemporary practice.
Looking at historical photographs has an odd effect. Once-dominant constructions of normativity, masqueraded as natural, neutral, or inevitable, become revealed as artifice. Popular 19th century studio portraiture developed a material alphabet of painted backdrops, tapestries, architectural fragments, decorative objects, and dress-up. This stagecraft is a collision point between public and private; interior and exterior; identity play and conformity.
Working with a small number of Victorian photography albums from the Slemmons collection, this body of work considers the stagecraft of 19th century portraits, along with the architecture of the albums that contained them. The album is a presentational structure where object and inscription compile in layered surfaces, flipsides, and holes cut as windows and insertion points. A hole is a portal: to another time, another space, to the interior of the body, the exterior of the structure.