ARTIST STATEMENT
Women of BACKBONE
A collaborative photographic series exploring voice, agency, and presence, 1998–2024
Photography, at its core, is about seeing and being seen. Through collaborative image-making, it offers a way to honor lived experience, acknowledge what often goes unspoken, and create space for stories that might otherwise remain unheard.
Women of BACKBONE began in 1998 in a small island community in Southeast Alaska. I was not thinking in overtly political terms; I was responding to the social environment around me and inviting women to represent themselves. The first photograph, The Gathering, emerged from a desire to push back against the pressures of small-town scrutiny and the ways women’s lives can become the subject of rumor and quiet judgment. Soon after came Ethel and Maddie and Social Freedom, responding to the ways women themselves sometimes participate in that system. These early images revealed the quiet force photography can hold as a form of collective witness and resistance.
The photographs were made outdoors in Alaska’s demanding landscape. Working with unclothed participants required careful preparation and mutual trust: locations were scouted for safety, warm shelters arranged, and volunteers coordinated so that every woman could step in and out of the environment quickly. The process itself became a culture of care. The series unfolded across shoots in 1998 and 2002, and more than two decades later I returned in 2024 to photograph many of the women again. Women stood together in wind, rain, and freezing ground – choosing to be seen on their own terms.
Women of BACKBONE is ultimately about that shared act of trust. When women stand as themselves without fear, voices strengthen, solidarity deepens, and presence itself becomes a quiet form of resistance.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bren Kleinfelder is an educator, researcher, writer, photographer, and artist whose work sits at the intersection of art, gender, culture, and scholarship. She holds a Doctorate in Educational Methodology, Policy & Leadership from the University of Oregon and spent nearly two decades in special education, where her focus on equity and arts-based learning shaped a commitment to voice and choice. She is the creator of Women of BACKBONE and Voices of Resilience, a mixed-methods study that grounded the project’s 2024 return. Bren is the author of Women of BACKBONE: Voices, Choices + Photographs from an Island in Alaska, and the founder of Summer Street Media in Salem, Oregon.
© Bren Kleinfelder