Regarding Resilience, Portraits, and Stories

Barbara Tyroler

Photographic portraiture weaves its way through our daily lives; as a tangible object, it may be encased in a family album, a sacred box, or the back pocket of a pair of jeans. It may inhabit a death portrait or a sonogram. Laced with a myriad of shifting projected recollections, it traffics innocence and desire, nightmare memories, sentimentality, alienation, and connection. Photographic portraiture enables the reconstruction of personal memories. It facilitates disruptions and connections in the search for intimacy and identity. It embodies the heart-work of reminiscence, souvenir, and story.

The exhibition Regarding Resilience celebrates nineteen women from diverse backgrounds and experiences. It explores responsive inner strength and perseverance, fragility, and vulnerability when confronted with emotional, physical, or cultural challenges that influenced and changed their lives.

Some of these women faced the challenges of multiple uprootings and multiple new beginnings in foreign lands, like Bhavani Amma Sobhi, a nurse who left her native Kerala for England, then colonial Burma, then Ghana, before resettling with her physician husband and teenage daughters in North Carolina in the United States. A more recent transplant is Polina, an artist who chose to relocate from Russia to the Triangle. Several have had to make entirely new starts in unfamiliar careers, including a successful New York City chef whose spinal injury forced her to move with her wife to a farm in North Carolina. Others have had to make fresh starts after a painful divorce, or learn to live again after a medical ordeal or unbearable personal tragedy. Together they represent almost the entire spectrum of human experience and upheaval.

Through a collaborative process mixing photographic portraiture with personal narrative, these women are depicted photographically and metaphorically integrating the aesthetics of light and shadow and the objects and environmental backdrops symbolic of transitions and memories of loss and love. This collection of nineteen women includes the voice of a North Carolina poet laureate, Jaki Shelton Green, representing her mother and her daughter. Her socially engaged mother was previously photographed and has since deceased at age 106. The portrait of her strongly charismatic daughter, Imani, deceased at age thirty-eight, is embellished and composited from the family archives.

Subjects selected various settings for their portrait sessions. One elderly participant, approaching one hundred years, and whose physical movement was compromised, selected the couch in her living room as the setting for her portrait. Cultural icons representative of tradition and commemorations from her home country and heritage surround the mother-daughter portrait. A multinational citizen poses within a fabrication of drapery, camouflaging and masking of her features. Over decades in this country and her local community, she found that the public face she presented served to conceal or reveal differences, prejudice, and assimilation as she navigated cultural divides.

Couples posed together, mother-daughter in the family room, and cousins beneath the staircase overlooking spring flowers. Having left New York City for the pleasures of a rural community, a wounded chef and her spouse posed in a window frame of the family barn. Spouses celebrated their nontraditional blending of family in a botanical garden for their engagement portrait.

Two strangers formed a spiritual and intimate partnership having found each other through a local interactive dance group. They chose to be photographed in creative movement poses in their backyard. One dance partner, having defied physical restrictions as a toddler, participates fully in an active and rich life, having now found this warm and rewarding relationship. Two solo portrait subjects, both visual artists, are represented with their own art layered within the final frame.

A writer-artist was photographed solo in the backyard woods of a friend’s home serving as a retreat center, where she spent many months in creativity. A businesswoman left a highly successful career and friends to be close to her aging mother, a joyful woman who happily resides in a local continuing care retirement community. She posed for a yet-to-be-determined audience. As commented by her daughter for the project, “this will be her memorial portrait.”

Two of the more adventurous participants were photographed below the surface of the water in family and friends’ swimming pools; one wearing only a bracelet and tattoo, one wearing her wedding dress dyed black, creating reflections, memories, and transcendence within water.

Participants responded to their printed portraits through reflective narratives. One artist wrote about her journey to this country where she assimilated quickly and was honored for her artistic contributions. She recalled emotional responses to the death of her father. Another artist considered her career path as a Black woman in the South and how she found a community of support.

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In producing this exhibition, we celebrate and commemorate our journeys, form connections, and share experiences. Social awareness of shared stories reflects how others have confronted challenges and discovered opportunities to ask important questions that may bridge the gap of discrimination and correct the preconceptions that pull us apart allowing us to experience our commonalities.

Throughout the decades of my career as educator, lens-based artist, and commercial photographer, my journey is never static, traversing that space of intersecting paths that swerve in and out of metaphor and artifact. I work on photographic portraiture, in the water, in the landscape, in the studio. My primary purpose in photographic representation of a life lived with resilience is to create and share lasting works of art, each with the capacity to stimulate reflection, evoke emotions, and preserve a life story.

 

Bhavani Amma Sodhi and Neena Sodhi

Cornelia Kip Lee and Mike Hall

Deborah Stanton and Anni Saludo

Grace Kang and Shari Goldstein

Ida La-Vern Couch

Jaki Shelton Green and Ivory Tate Vincent, Imani Shelton Green

Judi Israel, Bette Israel, Leah Steiner, Ilana Rosen

Marcela Slade

Polina Varlamova

Sarah Graham

Samia Serageldin