Allison Plass

Allison Plass is an American Fine Art photographer living in NYC. She received her MA in Art History at UC Santa Barbara with a focus on gender and identity in European art. She recently completed the Advanced Track Program at the International Center of Photography. This year, she is one of the winners of the Viewpoint Gallery International Competition, a participant in the Praxis Gallery group show The Portrait, and the recipient of two Honorable Mentions in the Chromatic International Photography Awards. She has also shown her work locally in NYC and her work, Uprising, appeared in the ICP 2020 group show, #ICP Concerned: Global Images for Global Crisis.

Hold Me Tight

In my series Hold Me Tight, I explore moments of intimacy and vulnerability between my husband and adolescent sons, often while on family vacations in nature. In this time out of time frame, I see their changing bodies, in adolescence and midlife, register so much feeling. And the sculptural quality of their forms remind me of early ideas of classical beauty, and the stories and struggles of Ancient Greek myth. Their physical interactions too, distilled in a photograph, reveal heightened tensions of closeness that are familiar scenes throughout the history of Western Art, and speak to a resonance I might not otherwise see in daily life or in contemporary representations of masculinity. Inspired by art history, psychology and greek myth, I like to explore these tensions of art and life, past and present, that a photographic moment can hold, and, in the process, present a more complicated picture of boys’ and men’s experience.

To view more of Allison Plass’s work please visit their website.