Kim Campisano   
Artist & Educator

Shades of Gray, 2022-2023

In September 2022 I decided to transition to my natural gray hair -  to stop torturing myself with the pursuit and illusion of perpetual youth. It led me to think about Transitions in general - how they are liminal spaces, in between, intermediate, fluid, conditional, in flux. All forms of life must transition, but it is also often as uncomfortable as it is necessary. 

These images are from an ongoing series of self-portraits in which I explore aging and the decisions that one woman of a certain age makes to present herself -  in this case, via cosmetics (or not), skin procedures (or not), hair color (or not), even though the camera angle, framing, and how much retouching a photograph receives. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we all choose how we present – our gender, our economic status, our ethnicity, our age, and more. We risk making society, friends, family, ourselves uncomfortable if we make the wrong choices. 

Once we decide to transition, or to bear witness to it, sometimes the hardest part is having the patience to let it happen over time.

We want it all at once.