Marietta
This photographic series is a collaboration between myself, photographer Isabella Hewlett, and Marietta Dang, a painter and makeup artist living and working in Vienna. Marietta’s Vietnamese-Austrian heritage is not only the subject of the series, but also the framework through which it was made: a shared exploration of identity, visibility, and multiplicity, held in both the images and the act of image-making itself.
Our collaboration was consciously co-authored. We built sets together, styled each look in dialogue, and developed a shared visual language rooted in detail and cultural intuition. This reflects my wider approach to the female gaze, which I understand not as a fixed aesthetic but as a relational space where the person in front of the lens co-directs how they are seen. In resisting the historically extractive tendencies of the camera, our process centred reciprocity, agency, and care.
Marietta’s presence in the series is both deliberate and layered. The styling draws on Vietnamese formalwear, most notably the áo dài, reimagined through modern tailoring. In other moments, the work turns toward everyday beauty practices. These gestures grew out of Marietta’s reflections on her recent visit to Vietnam, where she was struck by the care and effort many women brought to daily
self-presentation, such as polished nails.
The visual language also moves between the everyday and the theatrical.
The first look was staged against a hand-built set of layered, two-dimensional elements, echoing the devices of theatre design, where depth and atmosphere are created through flat surfaces arranged in space.
Marietta on our set in my living room in Dec.’24
In the portrait centred look, Marietta expanded makeup into an elaborate floral construction, using real flowers. While not directly drawn from Tuồng theatre, the stylisation resonates with its heightened aesthetic, placing her work in dialogue with both inherited and reimagined traditions.
Representation in this project is both subject and method. bell hooks describes the oppositional gaze as a way for women, particularly women of colour, to reclaim space and resist dominant ways of being seen. While I do not speak from that positionality myself, this framework shapes how I approach collaboration. My role was to create conditions in which Marietta could co-direct her image, shaping how she is seen and resisting reduction to stereotype or origin.
Ultimately, this collaboration offers not only representation but authorship. It asks what it means to be seen through a gaze that is female, collaborative, and culturally situated. In this work, the camera does not fix a woman in place; it opens a space where she can look back, speak, and belong.