ARTIST STATEMENT

My early work was deeply influenced by John Coplans’ fragmented body/self-portraits. By omitting the face—long regarded as the quintessential marker of identity—Coplans reclaims the body’s formal and intimate qualities, distancing it from personal identification. This revelation shaped my approach, resulting in an unintended performance that, upon reflection, appeared contrived. In my own search for self, I became the mask. To push beyond self-portraiture, I turned the lens toward my mother, collaborating with her to navigate my own identity through another.

Photographing family, much like Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home, opens up intimate relationships and challenges the role of observer and observed within classed, gendered, and ethnic frameworks. Every gesture with the camera is autobiographical. My mother became both subject and surface for my exploration of self, projecting onto her as a way to protect and examine identity. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau suggests, these identifications and projections are inextricably bound, each investigation reliant on the other. I found I could occupy multiple subject positions—both myself and the other.

Trauma is integral to the process of individuation. As Hal Foster discusses in The Return of the Real, traumatic realism and the construction of the gaze are central issues in photography. Within an exaggerated, partially fabricated reality, my mother’s physical pain mirrored my emotional grief. Her accident bonded us in a fatalistic mindset—her wounds, medications, and symptoms became a memento mori for me, a reminder of my own mortality. I was drawn to her suffering because it echoed the dynamic of our past relationship, even as our roles reversed. The theatrical décor of her surroundings reflected this exchange, as our shared history became entangled with the ornate interior and her compromised health. Trauma, though a window to the real, felt illusory, raising the question: was my “real” a delusion?

As Roland Barthes posits, the subject inevitably departs the unmoving object. As my mother healed, my attraction to this dynamic faded. I shifted from collaborator to observer of a reclaimed life, contemplating whether this distance could yield a deeper understanding of self. Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and the work of photographers exploring hyperrealism provided further context. I returned to my mother as subject, now viewing her as an [m]other—a woman embodying a constructed self, her own mask repressing the other. Bound by this script, a perpetual mask emerged, one that transcended vanity and delved into deeper realms of narcissism and fear, much like in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Our collaboration evolved into a silent, yet profound, exchange.

The act of posing inevitably raises questions about authentic experience. In my research, I explored Gillian Laub’s approach to family work, where snapshots become blueprints for re-posed scenes. My images are similarly staged, with elements manipulated to feign reality, exposing the artifice while questioning the gaze. Diane Arbus once said, “I arrange myself, not my subject,” a sentiment that guided my process as I sought to reveal my mother’s performance by imitating it. The dynamic between her self-representation and my own choices in representing her suggests, as Solomon-Godeau writes, that “there is no real outside of representation.” My work engaged with the uncanny, recalling Sarah Jones’ photographs of subjects in estranged domestic interiors, and Freud’s The Uncanny, as I came to know my mother in a different light. The masks we wore—mine and hers—melted into the fabric of our interaction, echoing Wilde’s observation that the truth of a mask lies in its surface.

Ultimately, this project is neither a portrait of myself nor my mother, but rather a depiction of our exchange. Between photographer and subject, there is always a compromise between intention and chance. We are not fully in control of the script. My intentions define the image, while my mother’s impressions reveal her own resurrected identity. As Susan Sontag noted, photographs, “like death masks,” reveal no soul. The truth, perhaps, lies not in the depths we seek, but on the surface—in the choices made, like the frame itself, where intention resides. It is not about stripping away the mask to find the “real you,” but rather recognizing that the surface is where truth lives, waiting to be seen.

Suzanne Méjean Pinney