Captivating, Not Captive
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.
Denise Prince and Charles Merward fill the space between psycho-analysis’ disclosures and enactments with art, neither illustrative nor semantic but an exemplary meditation on the role of the body image in the defense against fundamental anxiety. Prince’s images create a conceptual mirrorless camera through which the viewers sees a direct, live view of the specular double before its capture. Unlike the fashion photography with which she began, however, the uncanny doppelgänger forecloses any romantic fantasy and instead retains its traumatic core as raw identification with the other, without any symbolic mediation. Prince’s images demonstrate the enigmatic experience in which one doesn’t know who one is anymore, in which she doubts her own ego and substitutes her reflection with a stranger. Prince’s secret is revealed as her models reflect the viewer’s gaze: I am No One anymore. This artist’s purpose is to unveil the body as a hole, a dismembered space that emancipates the viewer from her image so she is not captive to its auto-eroticism. Ultimately, Prince and Merward offer an exemplary, elegant and brutal experience, Modeling Magritte and Kosuth every bit as much as Missoni.
Screen Test: The Photographs of Denise Prince
"Whether he poses or is real, no cat/Bothers to say" Thom Gunn
Much has been concerned, in communities that concern themselves with such things, with 'the gaze': the presumed patriarchal, gendered authority of the viewer of film and photo, and the pose as its symbiotic response; the pose mirroring the desire of the spectator, passive by necessity. Since, the pose has become ubiquitous, influenced by the dominance of celebrity culture (insert Warhol quote) and the maw of social media, the selfie and social narcissism. In photographic portraiture, the pose has evolved from, historically, a sober assertion of social respectability to an understanding of the portrait as performance and theater and---by the inherent presence of an audience, as artifice. If, indeed, identity is now considered as construct, then the pose is a handy component of its architecture.
The ideology of identity has been of fundamental prominence ---and contention--- in political discourse in the past thirty years, and it may be argued that photography, as the lingua franca of representation, is the most expedient tool of visibility, both individual and community. An endorsement by photography is an acknowledgment of worth of those that have been marginalized. Throughout photography's history, much of the work that has been most influential has disclosed individuals and identities heretofore unknown to mainstream hetronormative culture, and social media has profoundly accelerated this.
The writer Lynne Tillman has said: "Risking ambiguities, (Diane) Arbus vigorously subverted the subject/object position, shoving the viewer into her soft ground. She interrogated looking, aggressively, and made looking itself controversial."
A shrewd and gratifying summation of Arbus's legacy; succinct in its understanding of her singular contribution as not just the pathologies of subject (or 'victim' re: Sontag) but upending the comfort of passivity for culpability, a profound rupture in the history of looking. Arbus, says Tillman, removed the guardrails, undermining our smug alibis and immunities.
This 'soft ground': pliant, uncertain, yielding, bruised; without sensible footwear, vulnerable.
The female figures here, recumbent and supine admist draping swirls of fabric, haloed in turbaned headdress are, of course, a modern odalisque; the familiar clutter of cramped domestic life a substitute for orientalist bric-a-brac; a baroque of busted housewares. Here, a seemingly distant signifier of servitude and colonialism is redeemed and recuperated, an anachronism converting to an agent of empowerment and identity and agency. Those historically excluded arrive at the portal of beauty and desire; that recently denounced as objectifying becomes privilege, again.
Fashion photography reliably traffics in aspiration and desire, and identity as formed by style, fluid and mercurial, thus a cunning influencer of cultural taste. Regardless of recent attempts at inclusivity, however, fashion maintains strict taxonomies of beauty and class, renewing a narrow margin of what is considered attractive.
In Denise Prince's photographs, their resemblance to recognizable vocabularies of fashion photography propose the possibility of sharing the tropes of fashion and style to now include those who have been excluded from its privilege, to say nothing of public life itself. The transaction, this screen test, is rather more complicated, as the meticulous illusion of a fashion spectacle fails deliberately. Along the margins, the unruly debris of place, hard and unforgiving, encrusts the frame; later, the clumsy collaging into the lavish interiors of the ruling class remain on the image surface like a decal, upholding their separation, their otherness. The apparatus of the shoot-the chords, lighting stands, and clamps are revealed, left strewn about, and we see the staging and the back-stage, the makeshift. Sand (and the always handy sand-dune-fence prop) with its reference to holiday, travel, frolic, privilege, is here as sandbox-- indifferent to the demands of visual illusion. The gestures of fiction are undermined by the brutality of fact.
Prince does not comfort, rejecting pictorial devices of romanticism and leitmotifs of fashion imagery; no warm caressing light nor soothing soft focus, and the veneers that surround the figures are without mercy. We are stranded without the reassurance of fashion's stagecraft of transcendence and youth, the luminous body.
Like much relevant work of our time, the work deeply challenges conventions of beauty, and pointedly, our anxieties that chaperone beauty as a human characteristic. Here beauty is a triumph of ecstatic revelation, clenching and contracting: "Beauty must be convulsive or not at all". It is post-Edenic, in which the expulsion from the Garden does not elicit shame and awkward self-consciousness, but pleasure and play; acceptance.
The emotional tripwire of the work is availability and this moment of flirtation, and discomfort is ours, not theirs. Not Reggie, Saidi, Gail, nor Susie. Not Zelda nor Jacki. Our gaze is not avoided, and we witness an assertion of themselves as image, vital in their swagger, mirth, glamour or grace, and this gaze, not as violation, judgment and superiority but of ardor.
Stephen Frailey
