Nikki S. Lee

Nikki S. Lee’s ‘Projects’, created as one of her graduation requirements shows her dressing up as a person from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural groups in American society. A self-professed conceptualist, rather than photographer, Lee asks people from within the groups or passers by to take snap shots of her and her newly found ‘friends’. She has become an old woman, a skate boarder, a drag queen and an American tourist among many things.

Nikki’s skill appears to be in her ability to fit so comfortably into these personas; at first glance, her photographs look like ordinary snap shots, until they are seen as a group and the same person appears in them all.

A student with no spare cash, Lee didn’t use expensive equipment. This works in her favour for this particular series as the ‘snapshot’ quality gives an authenticity, which would have been lost had the images appeared more professional. Lee is a fan of the efficient project, those of great outcome with minimal effects. She feels that an image which creates layers, simple at first but which can be peeled to reveal so much more. Her motivation in creating the series was to see herself in other people’s shoes, to explore the relationships between her and others.

There is a voyeuristic streak to Lee’s ‘Projects’; she has momentarily entered the worlds of others, some that we see every day and others that are slightly more hidden, such as strippers and drag queens. Lee’s intention was to explore her place in society, although I feel it goes some way to explore the categories most people put themselves into, the instinctive need we have to fit into a group or culture.

I enjoyed looking through these images as they appealed to my love of the real life image, and then shocked my senses as I realised that none of them were what they initially appeared to be.

References:

The Creator’s Project (2015), Nikki Lee [online]. At http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/show/nikki-s-lee (accessed 31/8/15)

McLeod P.D. (2004), Stretching Identity to Fit: The Many Faces of Nikki S. Lee [online]. At http://cielvariablearchives.org/en/component/content/article/393-stretching-identity-to-fit-the-many-faces-of-nikki-s-lee.html(accessed 31/8/15)