Portraiture Category Winner

Searching online for the right word with which to name one of her photographs, Jesse Fox stumbled upon a virtual encyclopedia of irrational trepidations. “There are some really bizarre phobias,” she says. So many, in fact, that she decided to make a project of depicting them for a class in creating a photo book. “Obesophobia,” the image here, is taken from the resulting book, Phobophobia, which fox produced through the self-publishing website Blurb (blurb.com).

Although both of her parents are avid photographers, Fox began her studies with a focus on theater. She didn’t start shooting seriously until the modeling she was doing for photographer friends gave her the urge to get behind the camera. “It was almost four years ago that I started thinking about taking pictures to try to create art, to try to get a certain feeling across,” she says. But her affinity for the theatrical continues to inform her approach to crafting the scenes she photographs. “It was my background in theater that led me to want to create more narrativetype work,” she says. “I think that’s where a lot of my ideas have come from.”