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 is currently the subject of a solo show at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford. Among others, her work has recently been included in Friedl Kubelka Vom Gröller. Songs of Experience, Phileas, Vienna (2023) and Look! Exposing Art and Fashion, Marta Herford, Herford (2021). She’s been shortlisted for the 2018 edition of MAXXI Bvlgari Prize. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York and the LACMA, Los Angeles.