I met Maya several years ago when I was shooting her senior fashion show collection at CCAD. When she me post some images from my trauma series she reached out and asked to participate. As I did in the other sessions I asked her to bring a number of photos that represented her trauma to the shoot, which I loaded onto my computer and projected onto her, and made a number of multiple exposures. I enjoyed some of the individual frames in additional to the final multiple exposure, and included a few of them below.
Being the creative designer that she is, she also came to the shoot with some of her personal designs and ideas. She works a lot with red string in her work and told me that it represents “how we are all invisibly connected to each other and how we impact people’s lives.” A thin red line is also used by military and rescue personnel to represent the last line of courage that is mustered when protecting others. I thought that this had obvious metaphor worked well with the theme of trauma, self-protection, and survival. I thought it’d be cool to shoot a few frames of the string and then project it onto her to marry the visual approach of the first set. My favorite moment is when the fibers of the thread fall on her face, looking like blood vessels.
