Talia Chetrit is her own most frequent subject, photographed in various stages of dress. Measured, formalist, and undeniably beautiful, the self-portraits drawn on and deauthorize a tradition of female nudes in photography. Chetrit is interested in the social dynamics of viewership, exploring how the presence of a camera affects the behavior of her subject, perhaps exposing latent conditions or creating new ones, and in turn how the experience of viewing her works can activate unconscious impulses or preconceptions. Bodies sometimes seem like objects in Chetrit’s work, and sometimes this dynamic is inverted. She also photographs her body parts touching or close to objects, usually hard things like chains and vases: recalling early twentieth-century modernist and surrealist photography, a realm in which male artists often photographed objects and women’s bodies as coequal subjects of formal exploration. Chetrit reauthors this relationship, both overdetermine and subverting it.

Talia Chetrit was recently the subject of a solo show at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museumof Art in Hartford. Her work is also featured in the ongoing campaign of the highly-anticipated, inaugural collections of the new fashion label, Pheobe Philo. Among others,Chetrit’s work has also recently been included in the exhibition Friedl Kubelka VomGröller: Songs of Experience, Phileas, Vienna (2023) and Look! Exposing Art and Fashion,Marta Herford, Herford (2021). Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museumof American Art, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; WadsworthAtheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.