Pushing boundaries

Pushing the boundary of traditional portraiture, Homer photographer Amaia Nicole Crain creates scenes that feature the human form, specifically women, and address social issues and injustices.

“I have always been drawn to the human form, particularly women, and I am always looking to push beyond what is considered normal or decent, while still creating longing and beauty within my images,” she said. “It mostly started as a desire to give women a glimpse at how amazing and powerful they are and as I grew as an artist, it evolved into my love of the strange and bizarre sci-fi things, combined with my joy of photographing women.”

Bringing together individual images into a cohesive body of work is Crain’s exhibit, “Fever Dream.”

“For me, a fever dream is having a strange experience that can be unsettling, but interesting,” she said. “Some, if not most, of my work has a societal or political message and I think the human experience can feel like one big fever dream. We can’t afford homes, women have no bodily autonomy, we separate ourselves from nature and destroy what gives us life …fever dream. I’m striving to put emotion and empathy behind certain injustices happening in our world today and to do so in a thought-provoking way.”

Crain’s portrait, “Autonomy Abduction,” shows a woman sitting on a shoreline at night, with the only light coming from a tall lamp in front of her whose cord runs from the lamp to her mouth. This was a shoot Crain had been wanting to put together for over a year and finally created three years ago on Bishop’s Beach with Kristen Steimer as her model.

“I wanted this shoot to feel otherworldly, a world in which a human life, specifically a woman, was being used as an energy source,” she said. “I wanted the viewer to consider why the woman was there and if she had the freedom to choose. A month after this image was taken, Roe v. Wade was overturned.”

In her image, “Age of Misinformation,” a woman is sitting on the sand at night, her head resting on her knees with the light from the computer screen in front of her illuminating her face. Featuring community member Alisa Sonne as her model, this scene was inspired by Crain’s view of the world’s addiction to social media.

“This is about our current society and its addiction to social media and the rampant false information spreading around the world,” she said. “It was meant to be a representation of the origin story of the internet combined with our addiction to our screens. Was this where it all began?”

In her image, “I Think I’m Growing,” a woman wearing a red jacket, red skirt and red tights sits poised on and surrounded by a field of grass, with tall stalks of greenery and a scattering of daisies jutting out from her top in place of her neck and head. Modeled by community member Kristen Steimer, this piece was inspired after Crain had a particularly powerful year of personal growth.

“I think we have the ability to grow continually throughout our lives, with certain periods of time being huge leaps of growth,” she said. “I wanted the model’s face to be covered completely, almost like her old identity is being hidden away as her new growth takes over.”

Now in her mid-30s, Crain started photography when she was 14 years old after borrowing her basketball coach’s camera to take pictures of trees and old buildings. When her father gave her a 35mm Minolta for Christmas that same year, she started taking her friend’s senior school pictures and then moved on to weddings and family photos.

“My first creative portrait shoot was with my friend Sawyer when I was about 21,” she said. “I loved the entire process of planning the shoot and working with a model and feeding off of each other’s energy and ideas. Different models bring different creative elements to each shoot and it’s fun to vibe off each other’s energy and come up with different poses and ideas on the spot.”

Crain’s passion for the surreal and unusual was a personal trait she shared with her father while growing up and continues to share today.

“It was always my connection to my dad and is a huge influence over my work, allowing me to create bizarre things in the real world,” she said. “It’s challenging to execute the strange ideas I have in my head. I often think that if I were a painter, I would be able to create anything I wanted to, but I feel limited on what I can create with just my camera.”

Preferring to stay true to what is in front of her and her camera, Crain doesn’t Photoshop things into the image that are not actually there.

“Getting the idea out of my head and into a scene in front of me is such an amazing feeling and definitely the joy of the process,” she said. “I always hope my concepts are inviting enough that it causes the viewer to have some sort of feeling about the work, good or bad, but never apathetic. I have never minded offending someone by my work because maybe someone will ask themselves why this offends them and expand their universe a little.”

After spending several summers in Homer, Crain has been a full time Homer resident for the past year, sharing her home with her wife Larissa and their pets. Combining her creativity with social issues she cares about, “Fever Dream” is the first in what the photographer hopes are many exhibits to come.

Find Crain’s work online at Amaia Nicole Photography on Facebook. Her exhibit, “Fever Dream,” is on display at Homer Council on the Arts through Sept. 1.