Suburban Woman - a photographic study

Occasions of daily life often provide opportunities for finding ideas for drawings and paintings. It helps to travel with camera in hand, something I rarely do, but which I must begin to do more frequently. In the case of this photo, I had to ask the woman in the picture to let me use her camera, because the idea for this picture struck me with great force and required recording. Luckily, she is a painter, as I am, and understood my excitement with the sudden 'aha'.

I had gone for tea with this friend. She was going through a painful separation from her husband of ten years, was wounded, shell-shocked and faced having to leave her comfortable home to live with her children in a basement suite. Her finances were uncertain. She had been a stay at home mother and had become trapped in the bourgeois comforts of life. Now, she was faced with returning to a workforce, in which her skills as a graphic artist had been made obsolete by computer-aided design. She was, frustrated, frightened but determined to make her way out of her dilemma. Her young children were at school and pre-school. We sat in companionate quiet of a sunny morning and discussed her options and her plans for the move.

We had been sitting at the kitchen table, from where I had clear view of this window corner in the adjacent room. There the light from the venetian blinds threw a marvellous pattern on the wall, chair and the floor. I asked her to come and sit in the chair situated there. Took a look and thought, "Wow! This is a way I had never seen her before." The bars of shadow played on her and made her seem as if in a cage, a prison of sorts.

I asked her to look at me while I sat in the same spot to see what so captured my imagination. We discussed the symbolic possibilities of a portrait of her in such a situation. She sat back in her spot, and took, what for her was a characteristic pose those days - guarded, held in check, drawn in on herself, mulling the difficulties facing her. I took the photo, after standing, kneeling, and lying on my stomach to see what the most advantageous view might be possible. I went with a kneeling position from which to take the photo. The image appeared in the viewfinder - it hinted at a sense of intimacy, sharing and possible escape. I depressed the shutter button, and this is the picture that resulted.

When she developed the film, she allowed me to take the negative and have a larger picture printed. This is the result. She was pleased with the image - felt that it captured her plight and how she was feeling about her circumstances. It is not a fantastic photograph - just useful enough for me to have as a reference design from which to set up my friend as a model, and-from which situation to make studies and a painting.