Location: United States
Susan Borowitz is storyteller. After a successful 15-year career writing for American television, she embarked on a study of the practice of photography in 2011 and discovered a new medium by which to tell stories. The classes she took at New York City’s International Center for Photography led her to explore portraiture, street photography and creative self-portraiture, as well as introducing her to travel photography. Her experiences with intensive workshops photographing in the American West, South America, Asia and Eastern Europe helped sharpen her skills and eye for her primary focus, fine art photography, specifically staged narratives, where she expresses reflections of psychological journeys. Her images are in private collections in Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
A reference to ‘Locked In Syndrome’, this series explores the phenomenon of feeling stuck and the accompanying sense of failure to control the forces that seem to dictate our lives. Using metaphor and imagery that suggest the inability to move on, the series evokes the absence of agency and a perceived futility of each waking day. The choice to use self-portraiture reflects not only a personal journey, but also a common experience of women who feel consciously aware of what they should pursue or speak up about, but feel impotent in the face of a dominant power: unequal relationships, demons residing in the subconscious, societal expectations and especially the disappearance of relevancy with encroaching age.
