Peyton Robinson

About the Project

Though my body is the most fundamental commonality that I share with humanity, my feelings towards it have always been quite unfamiliar to me: foreign at my mind’s worst and enigmatic at its best.

This project has been a vehicle for me to perceive my body through an objective lens, my camera, and to explore its shapes and communicative abilities — to see the duality of my own bouts of apprehension and confidence through organic, instinctual posing. My performance for the camera was often like a dance — the most organic and fluid way I can comprehend and express my disposition through shape and line.

I photographed myself in my bed, my most personal space, both to welcome my vulnerability to the viewer, as well as put it on display for my own prying eye. I chose a wardrobe that shows my form, beckoning a visual display of my body and my manipulation of it. Despite my body going unchanged day to day, it is the impetus for emotions, positive and negative, that contrast greatly, sometimes by the hour. It stays the same, but my perception changes, and this photo series operates as my depiction of this paradox, as well as evidence of my body’s consistency.

I’ve utilized a diptych format to show both moments of honest and dire contrast, and moments that feel harmonious and sequential, because my relationship with my body is marked by this volatile rise and fall.

Through this series of images, I have viewed myself as empirically as possible while also seeing my own comfortability in front of the camera evolve as the days of this project progressed. As a fashion photographer, being quarantined inside for months left me with only myself as a subject. This lack of viable models for my photos as well paired with the self-reflection that comes with months of being alone inspired me to turn the camera on myself for the first time in years, using it to search and express something I couldn’t do as thoroughly with words.

About Peyton Robinson

Peyton Robinson is a Chicago-based fashion and portrait photographer. She fell in love with photography suddenly, not taking up the art form until her sophomore year of high school, when she mainly photographed natural landscapes and formal portraits of friends and family.

In the final two years of her high school career, she started pushing herself creatively. She began focusing on fine art portraiture as well as combining her lifelong affinity for fashion with her love of photographing people. In the early formative years of discovering her love for the medium, she owes a lot of her progress to her friends who were always willing and excited to be subjects for her budding ideas.

When applying to schools, her fast fall into love with photography led her to seek out a home at a college that would foster and promote her creative endeavors. She has now been enrolled at Columbia College Chicago since the fall of 2017 and is a member of the Class of 2021. Throughout her education, Peyton has honed her skills, increased her photographic literacy, developed her passion, and continues to find new sources of inspiration in the city and culture of Chicago.

Peyton believes it is essential to acknowledge that being photographed is a vulnerable and sometimes intimate thing, and she cherishes the relationships she’s built through being behind the camera. Whether she’s photographing editorial fashion or fine art portraits, Peyton’s greatest mission in her work is to use her camera to capture the essence of a person, not simply their likeness. She aims to foster confidence and build relationships with her subjects, because her passion for photography is intrinsically tied with her love for people.

Peyton Robinson's portfolio of work can be found on her website, www.peytondrobinson.com, and her Instagram, @peytondrobinson.