STATEMENT OF WORK

My work begins from the dislocation that image-making tries to conceal. I do not depict the subject; I aim to point directly to the structure that posits one.

In Captivating, Not Captive, I stage versions of fashion photography to expose its underlying structure. The models I work with—many showing visible signs of past physical trauma—are not composed as objects of pathos or pride, nor arranged for narrative clarity or representational coherence. Instead, they appear in moments of drift, disidentification, suspension: images taken before the pose is struck, or after it has failed. What has emerged is not the “real” body in opposition to the imagined one, but the collapse of that binary: an image that withholds identification even as it demands a gaze.

Having lived through events that forcibly disrupted their relation to their own image, the model's appearance no longer mediates their identity—it interrupts it. They do not inhabit the fantasy of being seen; they have simply passed through its failure before us. (I would argue it is not because the work is exploitative, but because it is true. The model appears ‘post-illusion’—and while yes, the people I work with have suffered, they have done so into clarity, into capability, while the viewer remains suspended in the fantasy she still depends on.)

This is not an aesthetics of resistance. It is not critique. It is an ethics of position.

Our everyday reality and who we believe we are is organized by fantasy, so we confuse recognition (seeing what we expect) with truth. In this way, we see only what we already half-know. My work operates elsewhere: in the space of re-cognition—a seeing again that escapes the limits of what we already “know.” It is not that the image is a lie. It is that we each are helplessly misaligned to reality even as we suspect this is the case.

What I offer is not a mirror but a conceptual mirrorless camera through which one glimpses the specular double (the reflection that shapes identity) before its capture. No reconciliation, no symbolic balm—but the core of identification itself, unmoored and unresolvable.

The body here is not the subject of the image. In that sense, my work does not attempt to say something. It attempts to subtract something—from the viewer, from the field of representation, from the violent demands of the image-world. What remains is not meaning, but a space emptied of pretense. The viewer is emancipated not by what she sees, but by what is taken from her as seeing fails.

What remains, if anything, holds the possibility of a new understanding of beauty—not because the work decorates pain or softens it, but because it refuses to protect us. My work proposes that buoyancy comes from facing what we mistakenly spend our lives avoiding. It presumes that a kind of elegance, even truth, is possible in the face of our mortality—but only if we take full responsibility for our pretends. When we no longer require images to rescue us from what is unbearable, we may begin to love.

At that point, a choice appears: to remain captive to trauma, or to be captivated by beauty. If one is captive, one feels only the anxiety of that early and unmediated encounter with the Real. But if one is captivated, one is moved by the desire to know, to love, and to recover what was glimpsed in that moment—what images, finally, can never fully contain. 

Denise Prince,  June 2025
 

note: the above was written with chatgpt. We go around and around in my never-ending attempt to communicate the sense of purpose that has had me organized around this work for so long. This series emerged from coming upon a nexus at the core of my experience, in psychoanalysis. Pieces of writing by Charles Merward since 2009 are referenced directly and appear without quotes.