Open Theme nominee

In The Garden invites my husband and two teenage sons into an earthly paradise, where masculine and feminine energies co-mingle and a communion with nature signifies a kind of balance before the Fall. Here, I imagine the liminal spaces of adolescence and midlife as an invitation to engage with their own feminine nature. Vulnerability and longing for connection become familiar rites of passage from boy to man. Origin stories are rewritten and the beauty and power of nature reign. Inspired by art history, psychology, and myth, I explore my own felt presence in this world of boys and men and reflect on the biases of our own cultural moment of narrowly defined readings of manhood.

Allison Plass is a Fine Art photographer living in NYC. She received her MA in Art History at UC Santa Barbara with a focus on gender and representation in European Art, and completed the Advanced Track Program at the International Center of Photography. Her work draws inspiration from art historical representations of the past that continue to shape the collective imagination and the stories we carry about our own lives. She is a 2021 Critical Mass Finalist and her work has been shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition #163. She has received Honorable Mentions from the Center for Photographic Art for her work Heatstroke, and for her portrait series, Hold Me Tight from the 17th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Award For Women Photographers, 2022.