ARTIST STATEMENT
My photographic practice centers on self-portraiture as a way to witness, dissect, and document my experience of being. I use the camera to look inward, often capturing parts of myself that are hidden from public view: emotions, impulses, questions, contradictions. By placing myself within ordinary routines, I reflect on how identity unfolds through daily life.
My work blurs the line between truth and fiction. I use real moments—doing laundry, embracing my partner, making the bed—as starting points for inquiry. These familiar scenes become layered when photographed, revisited, and re-contextualized. A photograph becomes both an artifact and a question.
I find absurdity in life habits like gender performance and domestic rituals. A photo of myself doing laundry becomes humorous when viewed repeatedly. My partner and I limply embracing on the couch may appear warm at first, but on closer inspection, the lack of expression and limpness of our hands raises more complex questions.
As a woman, I am especially interested in how gender, labor, and the performance of identity are embedded in the everyday. Photography allows me to give form to the physical and emotional work that shapes who I am. I explore the tenderness, repetition, and vulnerability of being seen.
I am often caught between being too aware of what it means to be a fleeting vessel in the world and distracting myself from that awareness by looking at my life through the lens. Photography helps me stay familiar with who I am, even as I keep changing.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Phoebe Snyder (b. 1995, Columbus, Ohio) is a photographer whose work explores the emotional texture of the everyday through self-portraiture and quiet observation. Raised by a ceramicist mother who encouraged a creative outlook and reverence for daily life, Snyder’s early fascination with the ordinary has remained central to her photographic voice. She earned her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2017, where she began using self-portraiture to examine identity, emotion, and personal narrative. After graduating, she moved to Waltham, Massachusetts, where she taught high school digital photography, guiding teens to use the medium as a tool for self-expression and reflection.
In 2021, Snyder began her MFA at the Maine College of Art & Design, deepening her research into the phenomenological experience of being human. Her work investigates how photography can hold small, subjective emotional truths and offer them as shared, relatable moments. As a woman, she is particularly drawn to documenting her own role in the world. One shaped by tenderness, vulnerability, labor, and resilience. Through her lens, the act of seeing becomes an assertion of presence.
Snyder’s work has been published in Vice, GUP International, and Fluter Magazine (cover feature), and exhibited in both national and international group exhibitions, including 15 Years of Draft: A Retrospective of the RIT Student-Run Publication and Unverschämte Schönheit in Germany. She received her MFA in Spring of 2023. She lives in Boston, MA and works in Providence, RI at The Rhode Island School of Design.
© Phoebe Snyder