WITHOUT WORDS SERIES PRINTS
about.
Bootsy Holler is an American photographer best known for her work as a portraitist, beginning with intimate depictions of herself and her friends at the center of Seattle’s pivotal music scene during the early 1990s. These formative years working both ends of the lens cemented her style and methodology. Her personal journalistic approach informed her work as she segued into a successful commercial and editorial practice while at the same time always creating art. Her art revolves around family, memory, environmentalism, emotions, eco-feminism, and giving feelings to the inanimate. Holler lives with her family in the east Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles.
The Society of Photographic Journalism has recognized her. Her series Visitor was selected for Critical Mass Top 50, and her art images have appeared in numerous publications like VOGUE, House & Garden, NPR, PDN, Lenscratch, MUSÉE Magazine, and Chinese Photographer Magazine. Her seminal work is in the permanent collection of the Grammy Museum. In 2020, she was invited to exhibit Without Words at the Shanghai International Photo Festival and other institutions, including FotoFever in Paris, The Griffin Museum of Photography, the California Museum of Photography, and The Center for Fine Art Photography. At the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, she was awarded Best-of-Show at a juried exhibition. In 2019, she published her second monograph, TREASURES: objects I’ve known all my life, and is currently working on a new book.
artist statement.
WITHOUT WORDS
Without Words chronicles a journey back to the self through nature.
As we embrace the power of the feminine and as we stop allowing ourselves to suffer in silence, speaking about mental health has lost some of its taboo. Without Words is about these moments — manifested in my psyche as I was detached from my day-to-day existence,
exposing what lay under the surface.
The spark for this series happened in Savannah, Georgia. I found myself alone in the humid night air, not totally inside my body. I walked to the railing of our deck, looked out, and saw my body floating in the pool below. I took the photo of what I had imagined that very night. I didn’t know it then, but that feeling of detachment, of being misplaced and discarded, would follow me through the next few years.
It was nature — its complexity, its quest for survival, its inherent beauty — that helped me return to my body. When I dug into the earth,
I reconnected to the feel of my own skin. When I welcomed the sea against my body, I recognized my own weight. When the wind hit my face,
I remembered my joy.
It was my passage back home.
