Interview with Rachel Portesi

Rachel Portesi, Bush Head triptych, 8x10 Polaroid. Courtesy of the artist.

Rachel Portesi: Standing Still

Griffin Museum of Photography

Through October 30th, 2022

By WM, October 2022

Photographer Rachel Portesi began exploring hair as a subject matter during an artist residency in Vermont. After giving birth to her son several years earlier, this was the first time she was finally able to be alone and self-reflect. Unexpectedly overwhelmed, Portesi began to photograph her hair as a way to deal with the broad range of physical and mentral changes that had happened in her life since becoming a mother, and the ambivalence that accompanied many experiences she had encountered along the way—pregnancy termination, familial obligations, aging, self-critism, and the absence of choice in traditional gender roles.  

Eventually, what began as a means of catharsis evolved into a fully developed and ongoing series, titled “hair portraits”, which incorporate long exposure analog photography and models with elaborately sculpted tresses of hair constructed in the artist studio. The result is an intimate look at motherhood on your own terms, feminine strength, and the use of hair as a window to the soul. 

A current solo exhibition of her work, Standing Still, on view at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, presents a selection of wet-plate collodian tintypes from the series alongside a compilation  of 8 x 10 Polaroids, 3D Viewmasters, and video installations with footage of her process, offering an immersive look into the artist’s lens and process.   

Standing Still will be on view until October 30, 2022. 

Rachel Portesi, Studio Portrait. Courtesy of the artist.

WM: You've had an impressive run of museum shows recently. When did you begin working in photography and how did you decide to be an artist? 

Rachel Portesi: I began making photographs at age 16 with my dad’s old Pentax k1000 and I just never stopped.  I’m not sure I ever decided to become an artist.  When I’d run into people I hadn’t seen in years, going all the way back to high school, they’d ask are you still an artist?  Are you still taking pictures? It feels a bit silly to say so, but I think hearing other people say I was an artist is what finally made me realize I was an artist.  I’ve used my camera to make sense of the outside world, and in this body of work, I use it to make sense of my internal world.

When did you first start working with hair? How did you come up with the idea to use it as a part of your medium? 

I began photographing my hair at an artist residency.  It was my first time alone in 7 years (since the birth of my son) and the first time I had a chance to think about myself in relation to myself.  I was alone in a big white room and a camera and unsure of who I was. When I began taking photos of my hair, I think I was trying to protect myself from criticizing my post child rearing physical appearance.  It felt like I had to rebuild myself.  I looked at my past in the way one might sort through their attic, tossing things out, cherishing others, keeping what I wanted to use to rebuild myself.  All the while, photographing my hair.  Victorians used hair to honor the dead and the loved, I was using my own hair in much the same way, to honor both lost and found parts of myself. 

What are some of the broad range of female experiences you touch on in your work? 

I wanted these images to be about strength.  Some of the first images I made used clamps and other hardware to illustrate strength – then I realized I was using what for me felt like male symbols. I thought more about the strength inherent in being female and began to use flowers as a symbol of female strength.  I was thinking of the power in a woman’s hair, so powerful that in some cultures women are required to cover it.  I was thinking of Ophelia’s disheveled hair flowers that symbolize madness and trying to take those elements to make goddess-like images.  These works are very much about my own experience in the very cis roll I choose as mother and wife.  I’m trying to honor the strength in that.  Much of my work is about the shift in identity I felt in relation to motherhood.  The losing and regaining of my sense of self.  Physical changes related to puberty, choice, motherhood, aging. The feeling of being pulled in too many directions at once or trying to fill too many roles at once, wife, mother, career, all while trying to keep the house clean and look good.  Overall, to me they feel like some lost matriarchal tribe, a world where women make their own choices 

Rachel Portesi, Frida. Courtesy of the artist.

How do you select the models you work with? Is there any symbolism or meaning behind the models you choose to photograph?

My models really found me and asked to work in my studio. Originally, I was trying to photograph myself as this body of work is about a personal metamorphosis.  It just became impossible to make the images I wanted and be the model.  Out of necessity I began to photograph my assistants hair instead (we all have very similar hair).  As I began using them as models, I realized they were the same age my mom was when she had me, the age I was when I opted to terminate a pregnancy. Sometimes I saw them as my young mother, sometimes as myself, sometimes as the children I could have had, and sometimes as themselves – young women who are stronger, have a greater sense of self-worth and autonomy than either my mother or I had.    

Could you walk me through the process of creating a hair sculpture? Do you have a composition sketched out ahead of time or is the process more organic?

In some of my work, for example, my work related to Louise Bourgeois, or in response to Daphne and Apollo, I have a plan and set about working on it, which really takes time because, somehow, I’m never quite able to make what I set out to.  Most of the time it is organic, I just start with my model’s hair.  How it looks; the way it sits that day. Then I go out to the garden to see what is in bloom.  Other days, I start with a framework of branches attached to my wall.   

Rachel Portesi, Homage to Louise Bourgeois quadriptych. Courtesy of the artist.

Where do you source the flowers and objects for your hair sculpture? How do you decide what goes in each piece?

The flowers and branches I use in my photographs come from either my garden or my friend’s flower farm, “Fast Pony Flowers.”  What I choose depends on what’s growing and in bloom at the time. I walk around and gather whatever catches my eye. Some things end up in my photographs and some do not.

What does your day-to-day studio practice look like? 

It is like riding a roller coaster.  Somedays I’m sorting through a difficult feeling and I’m sobbing and writing, others I’m making images that are really working and I feel elated. I feel like I spend a lot of time circling around like a dog trying to find a comfortable pace to land.  The best days are when I’ve made it past all of that bipolar art making and I’m working and digging deeper and really getting somewhere in a steady way.  

What’s the best compliment you’ve received recently about your work? 

My friend and neighbor is a trash collector, he’s the town’s garbage man.  Sometimes he gifts me old cameras he saved from the trash.  This time he was really excited to give me something he thought I would love.  He turned to me with a huge smile on his face and  handed me the treasure—I was surprised to see it was one of my own tintypes that I’d previously discarded because the exposure wasn’t quite right.   Somehow, the joy he had in finding it, and that fact that he associated it with me (without being familiar with my work at all) felt better than any other compliment I’ve ever received about my work. WM