By Amanda Knox
Dawndra Budd’s photography is like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. She captures dark, whimsical scenes that are rich with symbolism, and within those scenes, ethereal protagonists: Ophelia drowned in a bird’s nest brimming with milk; Pandora curled up sleeping in a suitcase; a pensive debutante looking out over the sea; the White Lady obliterated by smoke, haunting a farmhouse.
What will Dawndra make of me?
I felt a twinge of nervousness at the prospect of entrusting my physical form to the vision of a stranger. But I also felt a twinge of nostalgia. My friend Madison often used to use me as a model in her photography projects. She also tended to have something elaborate in mind, involving costumes, props and, occasionally, some yoga prowess. Madison photographed me playing musical instruments on the roof of her apartment building, contorted into the crannies of a neighboring apartment undergoing renovation, asleep over a game of Scrabble in a deserted intersection in the middle of the night, to name just a few.
In these cases, my creative input was generally limited to what about my physical form I was willing to expose and able to arrange within a space. I was the furniture, and she the interior designer. And I was thrilled to do it. Being an intricate part of someone else’s art project is a type of creativity I don’t often get the chance to engage with. With Madison, the experience was freeing and fun. I didn’t know what it would be like with Dawndra.
We broke the ice by meeting at Admiral Bird Café to get acquainted. Petite and pale, with dark, long hair and large, expressive eyes, Dawndra is a bit like a smiley Morgan Le Fay. Her upper arms are covered in colorful tattoos, mostly of animals. At first meeting, we shook hands and we each seemed both eager and nervous, politely waiting for indication from the other.
“So, what’s your process like?” I asked.
“A bit all over the place,” Dawndra said. “I come up with ideas that involve props and costumes, but it’s mostly winging it. It’s about the person I’m photographing, and how do we feel that day? I try to make it a portrait of the model, but it usually comes out like a diary of myself.”
Dawndra explained that she took a photography workshop at the time of her mother’s death. No one in Dawndra’s class knew of her loss, and yet, when commenting on her photography, the class agreed that the pictures seemed to be about her mother, and that they were sad. Dawndra burst into tears. Her portraits of others expose deep emotional truths about her subjects and herself.
“What do you envision for me, then?” I asked.
“I do a lot of ‘a woman alone.’ A woman standing alone on the shore…or stuck in a jar. I put a lot of women into jars,” Dawndra said. “But with you, I wouldn’t want to do something too… obvious… You know what I’m saying?”
“You don’t want to put me behind bars,” I said.
Dawndra laughed. “Yes! But maybe something with water?”
This was not what I was expecting, to be so involved in brainstorming the vision. Even so, it felt right, collaborating on this end. Our ideas built off of each other, sparked other ideas. We parted ways, each of us unravelling the symbolism of our narrative selves. A few days later, inspiration struck and I wrote Dawndra an email:
Besides imprisonment and my fear of water/drowning, something else about my history that I thought might peak your interest is the fact that my accusers painted a portrait of me as a succubus, a femme fatale, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a devil with an angel face, a bewitching beast…all variations of the same theme: two-faced. I’d be interested in responding to that flawed mythology, in rejecting it somehow.
Dawndra responded a day later:
What people perceived you as… I had dreams about it! I’m very excited about this!
