Corinne Pompey

This work is the visual expression of a woman perceiving herself. Historically, the genre of photographic black and white nudes has been defined by white female subjects through the eyes of white male photographers. This has created an incomplete photographic history where women of color, particularly those of mixed race, have gone underrepresented or completely unrepresented across many genres of art as both subjects and as artist. As a woman of a mixed Black and Asian ancestry, I share this experience with several marginalized groups. I do not align with the white, skinny, hourglass shaped majority within this aesthetic. I am a woman with curves and hips and curly hair; all of which has been omitted from our photographic history. So, I created work to reclaim and reestablish a new representation in which previously ignored identities can have a space in the art world to exist as naturally and as beautifully as they are. My photographs are in no way a negation to those who came before me, but instead an advancement and modernization to the work of previous women photographers, like Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, and those alike, who created and inspired the movement of women photographing themselves.

Inspired by and in conversation with the works of Francesca Woodman, Imogen Cunningham, and Uta Barth, this body of work has a narrative that is told through light and shadow to create abstract forms with the body. In some images, the body becomes second to the light while it acts as the main subject. All completed in the same space, the form explores the area, claiming it as her own while expressing the comfort one must feel within a space to create such photographs. The use of motion combined with stillness is central to the understanding of the photographs as it addresses the concept of time passing throughout the series.­