Jenny Calivas Turns Photography Into a Physical, Tactile Practice
What happens when a photographer stops trusting the eye alone? For Jenny Calivas, the answer has meant crawling across a darkroom counter, burying her body in tidal mud, and treating touch as a primary artistic tool. The American photographer, who built her own darkroom in high school and later studied at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and the International Center of Photography, began questioning the medium again during graduate school at Yale, where she felt drawn toward sculpture, performance, and the physical act of making.
That search led to “Self-Portraits While Buried” (2019–2021), the black-and-white series she made after earning her MFA in 2018 and returning to Maine. In the photographs, Calivas is nearly swallowed by sand and tidal mud along a shoreline she knew from childhood. Often, only one hand remains visible above ground, gripping the cabled shutter release. The images are spare, but they carry a quiet charge: part self-portrait, part performance, part meditation on what it means to be seen.
Calivas said she was steeped in ecofeminism while making the work, and the series pushes back against a long history of female bodies being folded into landscape photography as symbols of nature, availability, or passivity. Here, the body is not an object to be looked at from a distance. It is an active, resistant presence, one that changes the terms of the photograph itself.
That shift is also technical. Calivas could not see what she was making in the usual sense. Instead, she relied on sensation — the temperature of the sand, the feel of the light changing when a cloud passed overhead, the pressure of the ground against her skin. The result is a slower, more embodied photographic process in which perception is distributed across the body rather than centered in the eye.
Now working from a garage studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles, Calivas continues to test how far photography can stretch before it becomes something else. Her background in puppetry, dance, clowning, and punk performance feeds that inquiry, as does motherhood. A recent mail-art project with designer Matt Wolff, inspired by her 1-year-old daughter’s hands-on eating, asked participants to listen to food being handled, write down the sounds, then smear the food across the card before mailing it.
“The world is hard,” Calivas wrote on the card. “I am looking into squishier options.” For an artist committed to touch, that line feels less like a joke than a method.
