Olivia Alonso Gough


Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Photography

I think of looking at and photographing someone as a form of care. To see someone beyond the moment the photograph is made. To hold them, feeling what already exists and implying what doesn’t.

Photography is an accounting of life that takes as long as life itself. Evidence that we are taking up time and space. We live the images we make. We capture the mundane as well as the memorable, making larger pictures of ourselves. Technology further enables this continuous state of being. And I ask myself: what does my body know of photography?

I work with the ineffable, searching for where intimacy dwells. The space between things and feelings, the tangible and the intangible in actual, memory, or imagined spaces. Reaching to the far corner under the bed.

Currently I position my subjects and myself in a domestic interior. They speak of family as well as shared space with roommates, friends, lovers. Tension between the caring touch and the emotional demands. I enlist the inanimate things that populate our spaces to help tell the story. The hyper-tactile, even surreal. There I toggle between strangeness and sincerity.