On Reclaiming Gaze and Authorship through Collaborative Image Making

Before the mirror by kaya levin and inez lynch alfaro

What does it mean to make an image of another person versus with another person? Who decides when to press the shutter or what is included in the frame? Who owns the authorship of an image once it exists? What becomes possible when the boundaries between photographer and sitter begin to dissolve, blur, or evolve beyond the photographer / sitter binary?

For the purposes of this project, I use the term sitter rather than “subject” to describe the person in front of the camera.

Before the Mirror is a collaborative photographic project by artists Kaya Levin and Inez Lynch Alfaro, created in Santa Cruz, California during the spring of 2025. Working across 35mm, medium format, and 4x5 large format film photography, the series explores bodily autonomy, image ownership, and challenges the history of the female nude in photography.

Photography has long carried unequal distributions of power and profound histories of exploitation and violence. Historically, the photographer directs while the sitter is directed. These dynamics become particularly charged within the context of the female nude, where women's bodies have so often existed as objects of observation, interpretation, or consumption rather than active participants in their own representation.

Developed through an intentionally collaborative process, Kaya and Inez challenge these conventional hierarchies and power dynamics between photographer and sitter. The artists conceptualized the images together, photographed on shared rolls of film, and processed the negatives collaboratively in the darkroom. Through double exposures, collaborative self portraiture, and cameraless image making, authorship becomes impossible to separate cleanly between the two artists.

Throughout the series, stereotypically feminine garments and textiles (lace, translucent fabrics, slips, and veils) become important tools within this interrogation. Clothing operates as a site of contested power and dressing and undressing become performative acts. The body is not passively received by the camera but actively engaged in shaping how it wishes to be seen.

Rather than belonging to one maker or another, these photographs exist in a refreshing realm of collectivity: images that are shaped through mutual exchange, trust, and reciprocity.

Before the Mirror functions as both a visual dialogue and an act of reclamation. The work seeks to redefine relationships to the body, to authorship, and to the photographic image itself, resulting in photographs that are simultaneously tender, layered, and multiple.

The series leaves me with lingering questions: Can a photograph truly belong to one individual alone? What possibilities emerge when we expand our notions of authorship? What kinds of images become possible when we move from making photographs of one another toward making photographs with one another?

This is part 2 of a series highlighting San Francisco based artist, Kaya Levin. You can find the other feature here.