The Dresses is a deeply personal project exploring the generational trauma passed down through my maternal lineage. Centered on the symbolism of four dresses, each representing either joy or pain, the project reflects my confrontation of family history and my own experiences, including the abuse I endured from my sister, the loss of my mother, and the stories of my grandmother and great-grandmother. I brought two of the dresses back to the house I grew up in, forty years after I had left. Through their presence I tell a visual narrative of inherited trauma and healing. The dresses serve as emotional artifacts, icons of resilience and reconciliation with my past.
Thirty Years explores the emotional journey of leaving a home after three decades. Through a series of images of the same living room wall, the project documents a transformation from a bookcase filled with possessions to a stack of packed boxes, and finally, to an empty room with nothing more in it but sunlight.
The project I Am My Atmosphere is part coronavirus street photography and part pandemic performance art. It describes a specific creative community, my anarchist jurisdiction on the Lower East Side of New York City, who live in the confluence of political unrest and a public health crisis. I asked some of the subjects of my portraits to express their feelings in words on duct tape and stick it on their forehead. The words that they chose are life affirming, making images of resiliency and celebration amidst the catastrophe. These are portraits of our inner heroes who choose happiness during these difficult times. We humans have created this world, rampant with disease, hatred and fear, and now we must function within it. Our atmosphere is not just the air we breathe, but also our thoughts, emotions, and visual communications.
The photographic series Pandemic Gray tells the story of my evolving hair as a metaphor for the Covid-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020, in New York City, one of the first and hardest hit locations of coronavirus, amidst the non-stop sirens and palpable fear, I stopped caring about hair dye. Life as I knew it changed dramatically over the next year, and the encroaching gray became a measurement of the passage of time as one might mark the height of their children with a notch on a doorframe.
I am a photographer with a performance art background. Posing in front of my camera with costumes and props comes naturally to me. The self-portrait is my vehicle for processing the emotions I experienced during the pandemic. The characters I present are each a facet of my experience, showing my fear, anger and sadness.
The process of recording my ever-changing hair gave me a platform to include in this body of work an exploration of ideas around aging and what is considered to be beautiful. I have begun to see gray hair as something beautiful that usually only comes with age. Women of my age have often felt invisible as youth fades, however now, in these photographs, I am visible and I have a gorgeous head of gray hair.
Covid Woman is a comic book about a frontline healthcare worker who becomes a superhero. Struggling with PTSD from witnessing countless patient deaths, she channels her pain into purpose. Armed with extraordinary powers and sacred healing objects, Covid Woman steps into the chaos of illness, grief, and uncertainty.
Painting with light feels exciting. I create in the darkness of night walking through the image carrying a digital light source which places an image I have chosen into the photograph. The images that I decide to insert are photographs of myself either from my career as a performance artist or from my childhood. As the shoot evolves I adjust the placement of the image that I am painting, the speed or pattern which I move, or the settings on my digital light tool to create my vision. Time itself is important in the length of exposure time used in the photograph, and also unimportant in the meditative state that is induced when I hit that creative sweet spot. How my body moves affects the image, the terrain of the site, and outside light sources such as cars, airplanes, streetlights, the stars and the moon.
Night Messages is a photographic series taken at night with words written in the images that are made by painting with light during a long exposure time. Pairing quotes with photographs of public spaces is an intersection of painting, public art and photography.
The relationship between the images and quotes is not literal and so it is left to the viewer to make the connection between these two elements. This gives every viewer the opportunity to have a unique narrative experience.
There is a rich history in art of the insertion of words in public spaces. Night Messages is the next step taken from the work of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and countless graffiti artists.
Welcome to New York 1985 - 2005
Amy Shapiro released the photo series Welcome to New York 1985 - 2005 in 2016. It is the story of the artists, the neighborhoods and the unique time period in which they worked.
Amy Shapiro released the photo series Medical Panoramas in 2014 in which she used photography as a way to empower herself when she felt vulnerable undergoing cancer treatment.