Allison Plass
Writing and Photography by Allison Plass
Photo Editing by Tram Huynh
About The Artist:
Allison Plass is a Fine Art photographer living in NYC. She received her MA in Art History at UC Santa Barbara where she explored issues of gender and representation in European Art. She completed the Advanced Track Program at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2020. Her photographic practice is influenced by art history, the natural world and the intersection of cultural myths and the stories we carry about our own lives. She has received numerous awards and has been featured in solo, group, and juried exhibitions in the US, Europe, and Australia. She is also a 2023 LensCulture Portrait Award Finalist.
About the Project: Hold Me Tight
In my series Hold Me Tight, I explore moments of vulnerability and intimacy between my husband and two teenage sons, often while on family vacations in nature. A kind of sensory aliveness takes hold and I see their changing bodies, in adolescence and midlife, register so much feeling. The sculptural quality of their forms reminds me of early ideas of classical beauty, and the stories and struggles of manhood in Ancient Greek myth. Their physical interactions, distilled in a photograph, reveal heightened tensions of closeness that are familiar scenes throughout the history of Western art, yet speak to a resonance I might not otherwise see in daily life. What is the mystery of their masculine experience, does it even exist, and what are the biases of our own cultural moment of narrowly defined readings of boys and men? In this mythic space, I explore an epic love story between fathers, sons, and brothers which feels like unexplored territory in a traditionally homophobic American landscape.
You can view more of work her work on her website
