UNBECOMING
Kalliope Amorphous reflects on self-portraiture and feminine representation, revealing a practice shaped by transformation, instinct and the possibilities that emerge when likeness begins to shift.
September 27, 2026
INTERVIEW
PHOTOGRAPHY Kalliope Amorphous
INTERVIEW Melanie Meggs
To unbecome describes a threshold rather than a loss, a space between presence and absence that Kalliope Amorphous returns to often in her thinking about the self. Reflection, distortion, repetition, and entropy function in her work as both subject and tool, making images that resist fixed representation in favor of something she describes as fluid and fragmented, open to ongoing interpretation rather than settled into a single meaning.
Kalliope begins her photographs within a recognizable visual language of feminine beauty, but she has been clear that she is not interested in idealizing the female face. Instead, she allows that visual language to unravel until the portrait becomes psychologically expressive, extending beauty beyond its conventional associations with coherence and control. This is presented not as a rejection of beauty but as an extension of it, a way of letting a familiar visual register carry more than it is usually asked to carry. Working repeatedly with her own image, she treats self-portraiture as a form of material experimentation. Although many of her photographs are self-portraits, she does not consider them necessarily autobiographical, and is drawn instead to the point where individual experience opens onto broader questions of archetype, mortality, and time. The still image becomes a generative space in which these ideas can remain unresolved, returning the viewer to the photograph not for a fixed answer, but for an encounter that continues to shift.
Kalliope creates these self-portraits entirely in camera using a hand-built reflective chamber constructed from several types of reflective polyester film. The process is physical and optical. Distortion occurs before the photograph is fixed, so the final image records a real encounter between body, reflection, light and material. Instability is built into the conditions of their making. This is a considered method, developed and refined over two decades, and it reflects a clear artistic conviction. As she describes it, she is fascinated by the moment a portrait begins to open into something else, when familiar features are reconfigured rather than erased, remaining recognizable even as they grow unfamiliar. The photographs are not evidence of a face coming apart. They are evidence of a face becoming newly expressive.
Her stated influences run from Francis Bacon’s distortions to the symbolic and mythological aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites, while her practice is also informed by Butoh and other performance traditions concerned with embodiment and transformation. Across these references, Kalliope locates herself deliberately in the space between photography and painting, treating her images as a canvas for interpretation instead of a fixed statement. She has described being drawn, throughout her work, to themes of mortality, duality, transformation, fragility, and longing, and to spiritual and mythological imagery as a way of exploring grief, consciousness, and transcendence. These are not incidental interests. They are the throughline of a practice she describes as returning to the same questions from many directions.
“Women have historically been expected to be beautiful in front of a camera. The face is supposed to remain pleasing and legible. Even when a portrait is intended to be strong or complex, there can still be that underlying expectation that the woman stays visually desirable. I wanted to see what happened if I removed that obligation without removing the actual femininity itself.
I like to see these figures be adorned, sensual, glamorous, or beautiful while also becoming grotesque, distorted, confrontational, or strange. I want to get the photograph to the point where those states don’t cancel one another out.”
IN CONVERSATION WITH KALLIOPE AMORPHOUS
You are a self-taught artist and have developed your practice over two decades. Before we arrive at Unbecoming, I would like to go back to the beginning. What first compelled you to make photographs, and at what point did photography stop being something you were interested in and become the language through which you understood yourself as an artist?
I have always been a very imaginative visual thinker, so photography immediately felt like the easiest way for me translate all my ideas into something tangible. From my very first experimental photograph, I was fascinated by the emotional life I could capture. I saw that I could convey things like longing, mystery, sadness, and hope by using a camera in the same way a painter conveys these states using a brush.
Because of that, I’m not sure there was ever a distinct moment when photography stopped being something I was interested in and became a language. From my earliest photographs, the camera felt like it was less about recording what was in front of me and more about making an interior experience visible.
Self-portraiture has become central to your practice, although you make an important distinction between a self-portrait and an autobiographical photograph. When did you first begin placing yourself in front of the camera, and what did using your own body make possible that photographing another person could not?
I began making self-portraits from the very beginning for practical reasons. I was always there and available as the subject. So, if the muses struck at 4am, I didn’t have to wait to start creating. I am solitary by nature, and all of my creative worlds have always been very self-contained, so it felt natural to just start playing all of the roles myself.
It’s also very liberating being on both sides of the camera. I don’t have to explain an idea to another person and then direct them to convey it. I can respond intuitively and physically to what is happening as I make the image. Using my own body collapses that distance between the person imagining the photograph and the person inside it. I really can’t imagine working any other way at this point.
You write that a faithful likeness cannot communicate the psychological and emotional states that interest you. That challenges one of portraitures' oldest assumptions, that resemblance might somehow bring us closer to a person. What do you think conventional likeness fails to tell us, and what becomes visible only after the face begins to lose its familiar form?
I think that a faithful likeness can tell us an enormous amount about a person, but it is describing a certain kind of reality. I’m really interested in what a face can’t necessarily show us when it is functioning primarily as something we easily recognize. Once the face begins to lose that familiar form, some of the automatic ways of reading it fall away. It can become something more ambiguous: a memory, an apparition, an emotional state, an archetype, or something that we really can’t place at all.
Distortion isn’t a way of concealing the subject but of opening up the image. When the familiar signposts that describe a person accurately disappear, other kinds of information can come out. I like that threshold where someone is still present, but their likeness is no longer the only thing the photograph is showing us. Memory works this way too, because we rarely remember with total visual accuracy. We tend to remember with more poetry. The camera can remember with more poetry too. Atmosphere and presence can feel just as important as what someone looked like. I like to imagine what the spirit or soul might look like.
What interests me technically is that these images are created entirely in camera through a reflective chamber you built yourself, rather than through digital manipulation afterward. Could you take us inside that process? (How did you develop the chamber, what materials did you experiment with, and how much control do you actually have once you begin photographing? I am also interested in failure here. Does it happen? Are the most important images the result of something you deliberately construct, or do they often emerge when the material behaves in ways you could not anticipate?)
I’ve been working with different types of polyester film and reflective materials since 2012, when I first made my Glass Houses series. I’ve been through countless configurations and experiments with these materials over the years. Eventually, I built a reflective chamber that allows me to easily switch the different materials out. It acts almost like a stage set that I can reconfigure whenever I want to work with a different effect.
It’s very difficult to have complete control over the process, but over the years I’ve learned how to influence what the materials do and anticipate some of the ways they will behave. In that sense, the process has felt like mastering a musical instrument. At first, you are trying to figure out how to make it produce the sound you want. Eventually it becomes intuitive. Now it feels more like a partner I am dancing with instead of something I am trying to get to work for me.
Failure happens constantly, but I don’t really consider it failure. Some images are the result of something I’ve deliberately done, and others are a complete surprise to me. Often I’ll see something happen that I couldn’t have anticipated, and that discovery gives me a new direction to chase. With all of the experimental techniques I work with, that element of surprise is always my favorite part. If everything were deliberately constructed, I don’t think the process would be nearly as exciting to me. I love processes that rely on a certain amount of unpredictability.
Looking through the series, there seems to be a precise threshold at which the face is altered enough to become psychologically unfamiliar but not so completely that its human identity disappears. You have described being fascinated by the moment when a portrait begins to disintegrate and become something else. How do you recognize that moment while you are working? Is there a point at which distortion can go too far? What has to survive within the image for the photograph to remain a portrait?
I see it pretty much by instinct. There isn’t a formula for how much of the face has to remain or how far I can push an image before it stops working, so it really depends on each individual image. I’m looking for that moment where there is still enough of a human presence for us to feel that someone is there.
Distortion can absolutely go too far, although “too far” is different for every photograph. Sometimes a suggestion of a feature or a gesture is enough to hold the image together. Other times, something can collapse too far into abstraction or absurdity. I always want to get as close to the edge as I can without losing the psychological presence of the figure.
What has to survive for me more than likeness itself is the feeling of presence and that there is still someone in there. They are still portraits because, however altered or strange the figure becomes, there is still a sense of encountering another presence.
With all of the experimental techniques I work with, that element of surprise is always my favorite part.
The title Unbecoming contains several possible meanings. It can imply dismantling an identity, rejecting the demand to become a particular kind of person, or existing in a transitional state between what one has been and what one might become. What does the word mean to you, and what was happening conceptually in the work when you realised that this was its title?
The title actually began when I was thinking about how the word “unbecoming” is used as an insult. I was looking at some of the more monstrous photographs I had made and thinking about the ways women are expected to present themselves, and how quickly a woman can be described as unbecoming when she steps outside of expectations. I liked the idea of taking a word associated with being unattractive or somehow failing at femininity and using it to describe these images in which I was deliberately allowing myself to become grotesque and strange.
As the series developed the word opened up for me. I started thinking about “unbecoming” more literally: the opposite of becoming, a process of undoing or dismantling. Or, unbecoming one thing to become something else. Then, I started thinking about the spiritual concepts of ego death. So, the title eventually took on several meanings. There is the unbecoming woman and then there is the act of unbecoming itself. What began as kind of a joke or provocation became a larger way of understanding what was happening in this process.
Throughout a lifetime of making photographs, there are often people who quietly change the course of our journey. They introduce new ideas, challenge our thinking, open unexpected doors, or simply encourage us to trust our own vision. Looking back, who have been those people for you, and how did they influence not only your photography, but the way you see the world?
This is always a difficult question for me because, truthfully, I have had a very solitary journey as an artist. There haven’t been people behind the scenes opening doors for me, mentoring me, or encouraging me. I didn’t have family or any support systems. There were periods of my younger life where I was fighting for basic survival while also trying to carve out a creative life.
I think that absence and isolation shaped my work very deeply. I learned very early to follow my own curiosity and to trust my instincts even when there was no external validation for what I was making.
There have certainly been artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers whose work has expanded the way I understand what art can do, but that feels different to me from having people who personally changed the course of my journey. My creative life is something I fought very hard to build and I did it without any support at all.
If someone were sitting across from you today at the beginning of their photographic journey, what guidance would you offer as they start to discover their own way of seeing and making photographs?
First, I would say feel free to break all the rules. Learn them if they are useful to you, but don’t mistake them for requirements. Some of the most interesting things I have made came from doing something I probably wasn’t supposed to do with a camera. If an accident happens that interests you, follow it and see where it leads. You have to find what excites you and keep following it.
Your way of seeing is the one thing nobody else can teach you and refining that will always feel much more interesting than learning how to make photographs that look like everyone else’s. The best question you can keep asking yourself is, “I wonder what would happen if I tried this?”
Your work is so dependent on reflection, material experimentation and the controlled unpredictability of light. What does your studio look and feel like when you are making these photographs, and how much does that physical environment shape the images that emerge?
My studio is a cross between a theater stage and a ritual room. It’s filled with reflective materials, fabrics, lights, strange objects, and things I’ve collected because I thought they might do something interesting in front of a camera. Everything gets moved or reconfigured depending on what I’m working on.
I tend to work in a very immersive way, often for hours at a time, and the rest of the world disappears when I’m in there. I get lost in music while I am working. I can’t imagine working without it.
The physical environment shapes the photographs completely because I’m not creating these effects afterward. Almost everything has to happen there, between my body, the camera, the light, and the materials. I can construct the conditions for something to happen, but I can’t entirely determine what will happen. That’s where the ritual aspect comes in for me. I’m creating a space in which I can invite transformation, but I still must be receptive to whatever might appear. It has always felt very ritualistic to me.
When you think about the future of your practice, what are the new questions or directions that excite you? Are there creative risks you hope to take, or new communities you want to engage through your work in the years ahead?
What excites me most is not knowing exactly where the work is ever headed. Every big shift has come from following something that surprised me rather than deciding in advance that I was going to do something new.
Recently, after so many years of working primarily with self-portraiture, I unexpectedly began making work from photographs I took of musicians Tori Amos and Florence Welch. Through experimental processes involving light, movement, and optical distortion, those photographs have evolved into something different from conventional portraiture. That work has opened up a new set of questions for me about the idea of the muse, and what can happen when my visual language encounters someone other than myself.
That feels like a big creative change for me because my practice has been mostly self contained for decades. I’m interested in what happens when the visual language I’ve developed through self-portraiture is applied to another person, particularly women who have created such distinctive artistic worlds of their own. It has opened up another creative language I hadn’t anticipated.
Mostly, I want to keep taking risks that make me slightly unsure of what I’m doing. The moment I know exactly how an image is going to turn out, I get bored. The thrill of discovery is still the reason I make photographs.
While photography has clearly been a lifelong companion, we all have other passions that shape who we are. Beyond making photographs, what occupies your heart and mind? What inspires you, challenges you, brings you peace, or simply makes you happy? How do these parts of your life influence the artist you become each time you pick up the camera?
I have another creative life as a professional perfumer where I make unusual fragrances under my brand Amorphous Perfume. I’ve been a perfumer for nearly twenty years. Perfume and photography are very creatively similar for me. Both allow me to create atmosphere and communicate things that can be very difficult to put into words. Scent is especially connected to memory, and I’m fascinated by how something completely invisible can suddenly transport you somewhere else or bring back an emotional experience. To me, perfume and photography are both ways to capture the invisible.
Music is also very important to me. I come from a very musical family, and music has probably shaped my imagination more than any form of visual art has. I’ve always been musically inclined myself. When I’m not working on photography or perfume, I spend a lot of time working with piano and voice, and more recently experimenting with the shruti box and harmomium. In many ways, I feel like I’m returning to a part of myself that I didn’t have the opportunity to fully develop earlier in my life. It feels important to give myself the space to explore it now.
I also run Midcentury Archive, a long-term archival and research project centered on Dr. Martha Nickerson and the thousands of Kodachrome slides and vernacular photographs she left behind. I came into possession of the collection after she passed away, and I’ve spent years researching her history while preserving and documenting this amazing visual record of her life and travels. It’s felt very emotional and meaningful for me to take responsibility for someone else’s visual history and making sure it isn’t lost.
All of these interests eventually find their way into my photographs, even when I’m not consciously putting them there. I don’t experience photography as something separate from the rest of my life. Everything I love, notice, collect, listen to, remember, or become obsessed with eventually shows up with me when I pick up a camera.
