Kate Sweeney captures herself at the threshold

Kate Sweeney’s photographs generally take shape one of two ways. Either the image will arrive in the artist’s mind fully formed and she’ll then work to stage it as close to this vision as possible, or it will spark in the moment based on her surroundings. 

“And in those times, the environment becomes almost a collaborator, where I’m seeing something, like, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ and then the image starts constructing itself,” said Sweeney, who detailed in a late April interview how one of two images she recently had named to the longlist in the 2025 Booooooom photo awards came about in this manner in the midst of a summer 2024 road trip to the family home of a friend in Black River, Michigan. “And this image was definitely very much a part of that, where I approached it organically and let the environment become this character.”

The photo in question depicts a nude Sweeney from behind, her head hidden tucked away inside the lone window visible on the broad side of a log home painted a toasty orange-brown. The artist is on her toes, her arms extending from the window and pressed against the structure as if to brace her from tumbling headlong into the building. In the lower right-hand corner of the picture, a dog, Beatrice, sleeps peacefully, the animal’s relaxed demeanor existing in opposition to the tension exuding from the photographer’s pose. Adding to the surreal nature of the image, the dog’s fur is roughly the same color as the house.

“And I love the tonality of the entire image, which is something I just couldn’t have planned in advance,” Sweeney said. “Especially with the dog there, too, and how she matches. It was just this magical moment.”

Sweeney hit on the image at a point in time when she was in the middle of creating a new body of work for a solo show at Sarah Gormley Gallery centered on trauma and meant to “alchemize [her] pain into something beautiful,” she said. Beyond that, the photographer hoped the series could help her to reconnect with the sense of inspiration she felt in first picking up a camera, which had begun to feel distant amid the grind of eking out an existence making client work.

“And I think that struggle is something any artist can relate to,” Sweeney said. “You’re constantly trying to find that balance between monetizing your passion and staying true to yourself as an artist. And I was just so in the cycle of making client work, which is still very much me, but the purpose is to make the client happy. Approaching this work, I really wanted to get back to my roots, which is self-portraiture and creating from a place of lived memory and pain.”

In creating the image, Sweeney only auditioned two or three poses before landing on the one that appears in the photograph, which she said struck an ideally ambiguous tone between strength and vulnerability. “The arms outstretched, pressing against the architecture of the home, made it feel, to me, like the body straining toward openness but still being tethered,” Sweeney said. “And that is exactly what all this work I was making was about, which was trying to break free from haunting memories.”

Sweeney said she began work toward this larger collection by documenting painful childhood recollections in the Notes app on her phone, along with companion ideas for images that could help her to capture and transform these accumulated hurts. Rather than centering a specific moment, however, the photo taken in Michigan gradually began to take on more of a big-picture context for the artist.

“It really encapsulates the entire process of making all of that work, which is really just this self-portrait of transformation and of that liminal space where pain can meet possibility, or fear can meet freedom,” said Sweeney, who came to view the window centered in the image as the divide existing between these various realms. “To me, it’s like I’m either stuck between these two places or I’m just figuring out how to enter into this freer place. … And crossing that threshold is never comfortable, but it’s necessary for our own personal evolution.” 

The larger ideas Sweeney can now discern in the photograph exuded less pull in the moment, with the artist alternately describing the process of capturing the image as “instinctual” and “a dance” that forced her to navigate both the shifting environment (the light changed drastically as the sun arched higher in the sky) and the vulnerabilities that came with being undressed in a location that, while remote, could still be viewed from neighboring properties.

“Especially when nudity is involved, there’s always this sense of urgency,” said Sweeney, who captured the photo with a Fujifilm X-T4 set on a tripod and programmed to snap a new frame every two to three seconds. “But that mental jolt of feeling like, I have to make this thing right now, that’s my favorite place to create from, because it’s less about planning things out and more of a dance honoring the present moment, where you’re seeing what nature gives you, seeing what your environment gives you. … So, sometimes you’re ideating and creating very specific shots you want to get. And sometimes you just find a window and see what happens.”