In looking at myself I see my mother, and every woman who came before me. I see the constraints imposed on them, by society, family and themselves. I see the resignation and the surrender, and I see a glimmer of courage and strength coalescing to emerge anew.
What are we really considering when we photograph ourselves? Often a self-portrait is a way of examining one’s own journey, allowing for psychological considerations of self. In the case of Jo Ann Chaus, her series, Conversations with Myself, (The Exquisite State of Imbalance) instead considers the collective experience of womanhood using color and light-infused performative tableaux to create and mirror inner states of being. The photographs hearken to another era when women struggled to have a voice, instead relying on an inner narrative that did not match their exterior selves. Conversations with Myself is family album that holds memory, myth, and magic.
Jo Ann Chaus (b. 1954) is an American photographer from and based in the New York metro area. She is a color photographer and printer, influenced by the early color giants William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Saul Leiter, and by Elinor Carucci’s and Jen Davis’s intimate family and self-portraiture; she holds two certificates from the International Center of Photography in New York City. In 2016 Jo Ann self-published “Sweetie & Hansom”, a 60 image book with text, about her family of origin, and continues to make images for “Conversations with Myself”, her work of self-portraiture where she uses props ad garment to bridges the past with the present in her 75+ image body of work. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she holds special recognitions and awards:, Critical Mass 2019 Top 200, PDN Emerging Photographer Fall 2019 Winner, Winner 13th Pollux Awards non-professional category, Klompching Fresh 2019 Finalist, Candela Unbound8! juried exhibition, 14th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards Honorable Mention, Juror’s Choice South East Center for Photography Portrait Exhibition 2019, Permanent collection in the Center for Creative Photography Qualities of Light Exhibition.
Conversations with Myself, (The Exquisite State of Imbalance)
Conversations with Myself, (The Exquisite State of Imbalance) is a body of work in which I masquerade as another, summoning up unconscious ideas I’d neither examined nor expressed, as prompted in 2016 by a sizeable life change about to happen.
In looking at myself I see my mother, and every woman who came before me. I see the constraints imposed on them, by society, family and themselves. I see the resignation and the surrender, and I see a glimmer of courage and strength coalescing to emerge anew.
My inspiration begins with garments and objects, inherited and adopted, in lush locations with stunning light. I drape myself in remnants of my past and transform physically and emotionally into a woman who may have been in this place at this time, in this situation, telegraphing out a message.
In a mental state of suspension “she” is like a brewing cauldron of memories and references, a merging of the past and the present, the conscious and subconscious, from which narratives emerge and generate more question than answers.
The work is an homage to and for women who past and present endured and acquiesced to the weight and responsibilities carried as wives and mothers, traditional female roles, sacrificing personal desires and aspirations and unrealized potentials.
With tenacity and will, the resolution of the exquisite state of imbalance is to be considered.
