I aim to create portraiture that documents, editorializes, and shares a narrative about women to the world. Creating these images is an act of love for myself and for them.
— Tiffany Sutton
I create narratives about all women regardless of their ethnicity, age and body type. Creating these images is an act of love for myself and my female friends. I find inspiration in the works of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and Carrie Mae Weems. My style is a blend of my favorite attributes of each of these photographers. Arbus treated people that society designated as “freaks” with respect and a documentary lens, Avedon captured a woman’s beauty in magazine layouts, and Weems engaged audiences with a black woman’s historical narrative. I aim to create portraiture that documents, editorializes, and shares a narrative about women to the world.
My previous series used biblical, mythological stories, and medical knowledge to select fruit that is symbolic of a woman’s body, her sins, her fertility. The seemingly endless connections between the binary are what drew me to create portraits of women, eating, peeling, and posing with fruit. I strive to make photography that isn’t about women’s performance for me or for the audience with a male gaze. I am telling a collective narrative about women's complexities and emotions. This has become a feminist statement that I am still exploring and expanding upon.
I believe that the camera captures the soul. Its lens can focus on and magnify flaws and truths about everyone that steps before it.
For me, my camera is my gaze and view on the world around me; it has deepened my love and interest in any person I place in front of it. My experience with my camera and models is this: After she is comfortable, in a safe place with just one woman looking at her, she truly relaxes. The facade, the mask, the protective walls fall away, and she can be free.
Hear from the Artist
Tiffany Sutton shares some of the amusing stories behind the photos she has captured of her mother and the memory of her father in her series of work.
About the Artist
Photographer Tiff J. Sutton was born in 1981 in Rochester, NY, and was raised in suburban St. Louis, MO. She began documenting family and friends after receiving a Kodak camera as a Christmas gift in the early 1990s. While primarily a self-taught photographer, she also attended classes at Washington University in St. Louis and St. Louis Community College. As a woman creating photographs of other women, her work asks her subjects to turn their female gaze on themselves, thus challenging their prior self-conceptions previously created by the male gaze.
Sutton works with film, digital, and instant cameras.