Women's History Month: Suzanne Heintz
Photographer and videographer Suzanne Heintz has been working on her series “Life Once Removed” for 20 years, and this funny series of “family/self-portraits” thoughtfully questions the American ideals of family and women’s traditional roles in domestic life as wives and mothers. Heintz describes her series in her own words below:
Suzanne Heintz, The Vows: Greener Grass, 2014.
Laughter is the first step in recovering from the assumptions that cripple us. So, while the comedic element in my work has duped the press and the public into believing that I’m a crazy lady who lives with Mannequins, it’s also been the one tool that made the series work.
Suzanne Heintz, Notre Dame, Lap of Love, 2013.
For two decades, I traveled with this “Family” to the most enviable of locations, Paris, London, New York, and beyond, publicly performing fantasies of “true love” and “proud mother,” by taking staged photographs, producing a facsimile of the superlative female. I’ve managed to waltz, bicycle, skate, ski, and even drive an Iditarod dogsled team with these almost-human props.
Suzanne Heintz, Gas Station, 2017.
I’ve withstood mountaintop blizzards, been chased off the grounds of the Eiffel Tower by the Gendarmes, been detained by the TSA, watched my light kit blow over Westminster Bridge, right into the Thames, and even sat squarely in a pile of sheep dung on a Irish Cliffside to get the perfect shot. It was a royal pain in the neck, but I went to that extreme because, without that ridiculous monumental effort to attain the Image of Perfection, people wouldn’t take the point seriously.
Suzanne Heintz, Goodwill Towards Men, 2017.
I’m hoping that what people take away from my work is a serious look inward. That’s why it’s a self-portrait series. I simply made literal, the expectations society holds for what my life should look like. It looks as ridiculous, and antiquated as the expectations are. So you laugh. And when you laugh, you let go.
Suzanne Heintz, Shining Armor, 2015.
How else can you really change society as one individual? The way I see it, change happens internally, one person at a time. I’m trying to get people to look for themselves at how their sense of Self, and their life choices are shaped by expectations that come from without, and to consider if they are playing out some preconceived scene that’s not entirely of their own making.
This Playing House Project is a reflexive framing of expectations for and measurements of the female experience, yet this work applies to the human experience as a whole.
Suzanne Heintz, Sunflowers, 2015.
We’re all held to standards that have nothing to do with us as individuals, but rather to our positions as male or female. We are all gently and subtly corralled by the expectations of others. So subtly in fact, that we don’t even question, we just follow suit, because “that’s just what people do,” much like how birds maintain a formation in flight. But in a society that prides itself on alleged Individuality, turning left when the flock appears to be headed right, is a hard thing to do. Yet, I think, at this time in human history and in our present political state, it’s never been more important to be able to break from the herd, when the herd seems to make no sense.
Imitating Life: The Audacity of Suzanne Heintz, a documentary about Heintz’s life and work that shows behind the scenes on some of her more audacious photoshoots is now making its rounds on the festival circuit. Click here to see the trailer.
