While walking through Lowry Center today, I saw a flyer for a photographer coming to speak on campus. The photo associated with it was of a nude woman's torso--very sensuous, and in some ways very private, i.e. there wasn't anything immodest blatantly showing...only suggestions of it...the photographer in question had decided to explore the experiences of women who were photographed nude, or something like that. I believe the project also included journaling. Obviously, the specifics are escaping me now, but my first thought was, "Wow, I think I've used photography as therapy before." It was my way of processing the barriers in front of me and how I was planning to overcome them. Photography can be empowering like that.
The project that came out of that involved several images of people and objects in trapped positions, followed by both people and objects breaking out of those positions. My favorites of this series were, of course, the breakout photos. This included a shattered wine bottle, as well as a shelf of seriously disheveled books covering topics like comparative sexual poetics and similarly "out there" genres. These are the two photos from this project of nearly 50 images that hang in my house today.
