Artist's Statement
These portraits celebrate what it means today to age as a woman, a vastly underrepresented demographic in photography. Supplemented with an accompanying short poem, each portrait is, in essence, a collaboration between photographer, author, and sitter, in which individuality and personality shine through. The poems eloquently give further insight to the sitters, suggesting additional depth to the portraits and their subjects.
The short biographical narratives delve into lives rich with accomplishments and stories.
Distinct from the work in the first exhibition of Women Among Us, the images in this portfolio were taken out of the studio, documenting women, instead, in their personal environments, some in their homes, some in their workspaces, each a space of unique significance. The portraits are loosely inspired by the German photographer August Sander, specifically his decades-long project People of the Twentieth Century. I've aimed to include individuating aspects of the environments inhabited by my subjects: beakers in the lab, paintings in the studio, an inspirational bookshelf, a child hiding behind a curtain. The environmental portrait offers insight into the personalities of each woman through an intimate encounter with a meaningful space.
- Becki Rutta
Group Statement
A non-profit organization (since 2022), Women Among Us Inc. has created a photographic and narrative series about women 65 and over in the Big Bend area. Through our exhibitions and community outreach, we hope that these women will be seen, but also recognized and valued. They are women who have dedicated themselves to what they love doing for decades. They have made a positive impact on our community.
The 2023 Women Among Us: Portraits of Strength, our second group project, continues to explore a series of related questions: How do we age? How can we represent the process of aging? What does aging mean for a life of meaningful achievements and contributions.
Each of the 20 women featured in this portfolio has impacted their community through education, activism, or artistic achievement. Some continue to do so. From revitalizing neighborhoods to reimagining spaces to founding schools to preserving the environment, these women are community leaders. In a concerted effort to convey the depth and richness of their experiences, all 20 of the women sitters took the time to share their stories, each narrative as individual as the women themselves.
2021–2022
Anxiety Masks
A Collaboration with Linda Hall
I gave birth to my first daughter in the midst of the pandemic. Like many mothers around the world, I was now raising a child who had little opportunity for social interaction with people, let alone people not wearing a mask. She struggled to make sense of half-covered faces encountered at a distance, and I am left wondering how this uncharted environment has shaped her emerging self-identity.
Linda Hall’s Anxiety Masks offer a similar form of protection to the ubiquitous medical mask, providing shelter from the world to those who wear them. Exquisitely crafted, they are also elaborate and whimsical, comforting for some and alienating for others. Although she has been making masks for years, her works now carry different meanings in a world where everyone wears one in public. The visual cues on which we traditionally depend to communicate are absent to us. In their place we are greeted now so often with an inscrutable masked face.
My photographs explore this body of work in varied environments—some private, some public, some commercial, some recreational—to see how they are transformed by different contexts. Unlike most face coverings, the Anxiety Masks cover the entire head and sometimes the whole body. Precisely because they are so idiosyncratic, they serve to replace the experience of expressive legibility.
