Jenny Calivas

Jenny Calivas was born in 1984 in New Hampshire and grew up there in a small town. She studied documentary photography at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, ME before getting her B.A. in Photography and Russian Studies from The Evergreen State College. She’ll be attending The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture this summer and pursuing her MFA at Yale starting this fall.

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It’s All Going To The Same Place
I met the subject of this project while out photographing on the streets of my hometown in New Hampshire. Coming from a documentary background my first instinct was to follow her around taking pictures but as we spent more and more time together I found myself wanting to put my camera away and just listen to her stories. Eventually “fieldwork” came to involve no shooting at all, rather listening, looking, thinking and working out my impressions by staging images later on. The result is an impressionistic portrait that aims to capture some of the more inexplicable feelings that I struggled to include in past documentary projects.

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"My coat, my son's train set, everything"

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"It's already swollen"

"The last time I modeled was for a boyfriend"

To see more of Jenny’s work, check out her website.