DAYDREAM IN MEMORIES OF YOUTH
PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHANIE DUPRIE ROUTH
NOTE: The illustrated version of this publication is available on Substack at https://foxondaydreamsessay.substack.com/p/daydream-in-memories-of-youth
Daydream in Memories of Youth is a series of nineteen photographs by Stephanie Duprie Routh about memory, nostalgia, desire, the desire to be desired and to feel deeply, and the passage of time. The author of this work has a personal message to convey, narrating the loss she feels as her exterior aspect matures and shifts the way she is viewed in the world, concealing the presence of something youthful, seductive, and powerful, that is still very alive within her. What intrigues me most, however, is that how one sees and is seen, is at the core of her inquiry. And of course, undertaking an investigation into the power and dynamics of looking, seeing, and being seen, via the medium of photography, could not be more apt.
[Soft/Memory/Distancing]
Interestingly, this series was not shot as a single campaign designed to tell a story, but was picked out somewhat retroactively by the author from hundreds of photos from multiple shoots that took place in locations as diverse as New York, Miami, Morocco, India, and Mexico City, between 2018 and 2024. Yet it holds together–bound by an individual perspective that influenced the selection, and tied together by the singular visual voice of the author. Consistent stylistic signatures include the dark neutral palette and soft atmospherics achieved by shooting through filters like fabric and moistened glass. Wide apertures also narrow the depth of field. This gentle focus is applied at times to the background, and at other times to the subject, and sometimes overlays the entire frame. It is an elegant device for illustrating how memories occur to us. Sometimes memories linger in the background of our consciousness, and sometimes they come to the fore. Like dreams, they are sometimes nothing more than a faint or fuzzy recollection of a time, a place, or a feeling. Other times the scene is more fully rendered, but the importance of it, our our particular role in it, is occluded. Memories can also come at us clear as day, bringing us – like it or not – to another time and place with all of its pleasure and pain. It is the nature of memory to be rich with emotion. Experiences with heightened emotion are the ones that etch themselves into our minds, rather than the other 99% of life’s moments that are spent in unconscious, habitual, analytical, or transactional modes of being. Consider that oftentimes, the memory of how a moment felt is clearer than the memory of what was actually happening in the room.
[Rooms/Architecture]
Speaking of rooms, architectural frameworks are a motif that shows up fairly consistently in this series. Windows feature prominently in Veiled, Phoenix, Morning Afterglow, and Out of Body Experience. Aside from the glass providing a dramatic lighting source and filtering surface as previously mentioned, the frames themselves define space without wholly containing it. In some cases, the frames mark a liminal zone where one can be literally both inside and outside a frame (Veiled and Bound) as if half way between two worlds. Framed mirrors describe confusing but contained spaces in Can I Be All Four, Staring at a Memory, and Are You Watching Me? Framing is of course also core to composing a photograph. A frame delineates what is inside and what is out, although it does not always hold up as a boundary, it still becomes a kind of container. In imagery that is so open-ended, architecture can provide structure. Scaffolding or a brick wall (Like, Moving from Seen to Unseen) quickly turn a sidewalk scene into a shallow stage set, providing reference points helps us to understand where the subjects’ bodies stand in space. If it is true that we exist in our bodies, it is also true that these bodies exist in a physical world, in relation to structures and objects that in turn impact our sense of our bodies, of our movements, our privacy, and our visibility to others.
[Daydreams]
The first word in the project’s title, Daydream in Memories of Youth, reminds us that these are not actual memories of a specific individual’s life. Rather, they are constructed fictions generated to capture and express a real but fleeting memory of being so wholly present in our bodies when we were young. How ripe and full of significance it felt, how empowering and alive we felt, and how much it hurt to be that present! As we mature we distance ourselves from that primal way of being, perhaps to protect our own vulnerable hearts, perhaps to hedge against the social disdain we inevitably encounter once the next young thing comes into view. We earnestly turn everyone’s attention to what we think and what we accomplish, asking to be respected for that rather than for how we look. It is a valiant and successful strategy. Yet what might we have lost in this process? How do we access an embodied experience from here? Do you remember? It is this gap that Routh is working in.
[Authenticity/Suspension of disbelief]
Another interesting effect of the lack of universal focus in many of these images is that they read as quick shots (whether they are or not). This imbues them with an aura of authenticity - as if the photographer happened on these scenes by accident and hastily captured them without having the time to focus or fully frame them. In many cases this was truly how they originated, whereas others were more crafted. Regardless, the end result is that we read them all as if they were records of things that really happened, showing how we are drawn to and yearn for a sense of truth, how we want to suspend our disbelief, regardless of how fictional or constructed the illusion may be. While a photograph does tend to capture a specific occurrence at an actual moment in time, said occurrence can be a carefully staged situation. This is only a problem if we expect photography to be documentary. If we come at it from the perspective of narrative film, where suspension of disbelief is an assumed premise, we as viewers readily enter the invented world on offer, reading the space and relating to the characters in Routh’s scenes as if they were actual people, regardless of who they really are. We ask of the characters, not the actors: where is she, what is she doing, who is she talking to, sleeping with, walking toward? Why is she so pensive or sad?
[Open/multiple perspectives]
While coherent to an extent, this series also refuses to hold together in many ways. And this is perhaps what makes it even more interesting. One aspect I keep returning to is how Routh engages her subjects from a multiplicity of perspectives. I consider this to be, on the one hand, a very successful evasion of what was thirty years ago discussed as a one-way, patriarchal, objectifying gaze. But it is also an inquiry into looking and seeing, a reminder of how power, agency, and a deep desire to know and be known run through the way we look at, see, and are seen by other individuals in the world around us every day.
At the risk of imposing a structural organization on something that I have also celebrated as inherently varied and unclear, I would like to call out four perspectival frameworks that show up in the series. These have to do with the relationship between the photographer and the subject in the photograph. But an uncanny thing happens when we look at a photograph: the photographer disappears. And we, the audience or viewer, stand in her place. Stephanie Dupurie Routh is out of the picture, but you the viewer are suddenly, somehow, just by virtue of looking at her photograph, in her place, assuming a viewing perspective that is tied to a viewpoint in the world construed by the image.
Let us begin with the images where there is the least engagement between the viewer and the subject. In pieces like Moving from Seen to Unseen, and Like, the subject is barely there. All we see is a trace of someone who was there a moment ago and has already moved on. In works like Under Overwhelmed, Chauné, and Out of the Corner of My Eye, the gap is not temporal but spatial. The subject’s presence is known, but layers of reflections destabilize our understanding of where exactly they are in relation to us and the physical world. Out of Body Experience takes this to a new level, confusing our reading of what is in our view, making us unsure whether the figure sits in front of us (in which case we are in the bedroom with her), or elsewhere, shown only as an echo of another place and time.
Next are images where the subject is right before us, but we are separated from them. As we stand behind the foggy scrim in Veiled, Hope Extends Beyond the Glass that Traps, or Phoenix I, we are the ones protected by the translucent filters, allowing us to pretend that we are not seen, giving us the role of an omniscient narrator, or to the extent that it may be a private moment, as in Phoenix I or Can I be All Four?, the role of voyeur. Here the viewer begins to be more engaged, and may encounter feelings of curiosity, titillation, and possibly even guilt, whether it is from looking at a subject that some may consider sexy or taboo, or simply from looking at something that we have the distinct feeling wasn’t meant for us to see. Or was it?
In other photographs from the series, the viewer quickly becomes ever more implicated. Some are built as puzzles with triangulating gazes. In Are You Watching Me, the woman in the background locks eyes with you (the viewer), catching you in the act of watching the foreground figure’s gesture of ecstasy. In Woof, a masked figure looks directly at you, but in a sideways manner, suggesting that you are not the target of their sexual intentions, but again an on-looker, the third one in the room, caught in the act of watching, but being instructed to stay silent, be still, do not interfere. In Staring at a Memory / Internal External Questions, the viewer is so close to the subject (a young woman in a nightgown staring into a mirror) that you can’t help but wonder what you are doing in her bedroom, how you came to be so close to her back, and who are the copulating figures in the painting reflected in the mirror where you should be? Morning Afterglow is less puzzling. Here you are actually the one in bed, waking to the first fuzzy rays of a new day, surrounded by rumpled sheets and memories of the night before.
Finally, there are several images where the subject looks squarely at the viewer. They see you looking at them, and they see you. A relationship is in play. Some of these images are heavy with pathos. Youth, and In Between/Frozen, for example, portray a deep emotion and presence in the faces of the women portrayed. They look at us asking for recognition and understanding. “I know you see me, but do you see me?” Knowing and Julia Fierce, show women full of even more confidence, wisdom, and a sense of agency that is clearly be directed toward the viewer but is in no way contingent on them.
[1970s Male Gaze]
I would like to return briefly here to a previous remark I made about the patriarchal gaze. Much was written in the 1970s and 80s about how patriarchal power structures had pervaded Western art traditions for centuries, rendering images of women, and nude women in particular, in a manner designed to sexually please and confirm the confidence of powerful heterosexual men. In his 1972 Book, Ways of Seeing, John Berger explained how traditional European oil paintings had been showing women as passive sexual objects of display for centuries. He and his writing partners went on to illustrate how this approach had continued to inform representations of women in contemporary mass media including advertising, television, film (not to mention pornography), observing that in western visual culture, “women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.” (Berger, 55)
Berger also pointed out how the pervasiveness of this way of looking had insidiously saturated even women’s own views of themselves as someone that is always being viewed. In Berger’s words: “From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as two constituent but always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.” (Berger, 46)
Although she came from a different critical lineage than Berger, British writer Laura Mulvey published (in 1975), an essay titled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” examining how “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey, 837). Two years later, in 1977, another important cultural critic of the time, Susan Sontag, published On Photography, describing photography as a violent action, analogous to using a gun to subjugate a subject. While this side-stepped the gendering of the gaze, it added to a legacy of critical thinking that left my generation wondering if there was such a thing as a non-violent gaze, and whether it was even possible to make a picture, much less of a sexual woman, without it falling into the patriarchal power conventions so deeply embedded in our society?
[Soloway and The Female Gaze]
Interestingly, the alternative concept of a “female gaze” was not really explored in depth by the next generation of critics or academics. This is likely because they had already begun to question the dualistic structuralist approach of their predecessors, exposing binary categorization itself as a hollow framework and tool of oppression. There was a brief moment, in 2016, when feminist film-maker Joey Soloway gave a key-note address at the Toronto Film Festival on the topic of the female gaze. Noting that it had been 40 years since Mulvey coined the term, and that no one had taken the term “female gaze” since then, they declared: “I’m taking it now,” (3:15-3:30) and proceeded to list the ways that it was distinct from the male gaze. I both paraphrase and summarize here:
Feeling seeing - getting inside the feelings of the protagonist as they are held in her body. . . reclaiming the body, using it with intention to communicate feeling seeing.
The gazed gaze - showing how it feels to be the object of a gaze, to be seen, and how awareness of this can be part of a story of a protagonist’s growing power.
Returning the gaze - I see you seeing me - I refuse to be a passive object. I am a subject with her own gaze and I have the power to turn it where I choose.
In sum, Soloway proposed that the female gaze could be used to create empathy for a point of view that originates in a woman’s body (instead of a man’s), to show a woman not as a madonna or a whore but as a whole human being with a messy complicated truth. Soloway ended their talk with a kind of spoken-word poem: “She is the feel with me gaze, the being seen gaze, I see you gaze, the truth gaze.” (Soloway, 41:59)
In the question-and-answer period following this speech, Soloway acknowledged that the term “female gaze” was problematic, and mainly only useful as a tool for making distinctions from the male gaze, and she suggested that “in a few years the binary will become an incredibly problematic concept.” (Soloway, 45:11) This was prescient to say the least, and could explain why they and other cultural critics have not continued to build out the concept of the female gaze as such, in the ten years since.
Yet I would like to argue that the the manner of viewing that Soloway described remains an important one. If I might take the liberty of retrieving it, so that we are not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Of course we can let go of the idea that this is a distinctly female way of looking (because ‘female’ can no longer be defended as a distinct or universal category), but the view that they describe still stands up as an alternative to the traditional (and still pervasive, whether discussed or not) objectifying gaze. Perhaps what they are describing is simply a humanizing gaze: one that shows human beings with complex embodied feelings, including private feelings that may include, among many other things, vulnerability, sensuality, desire, a desire to be desired, a need for intimacy and belonging, and for being seen. I want to make the distinction here between being looked at as an object, symbol, type, or a collection of physical attributes, and actually being seen, which implies a much deeper kind of acknowledgement. Berger himself wrote that being seen, first by one’s-self (in the Lacanian sense) and then by others, is what “makes it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.” (Berger, 9) Otherwise, if the tree falls and no one hears it, did it fall? Does it even exist? Do we exist? Regardless of their gender or sexual preferences, no one wants to be objectified, but neither does anyone want to be invisible or overlooked. What lies in between is someone who is seen, and is seen not as an object displayed for another’s pleasure, but as a feeling, sentient, human being.
[Back to Routh]
We can take that lens and see how Stephanie Duprie Routh’s photography brings her subjects forward with so much sensitivity and in such a rich narrative space, that they succeed at being the subjects of her images without being objects. The people in these pictures are not presented as passive bodies on display for a distinctly male audience. These are images of embodied women. These women are alive in and through their bodies. They hold their bodies, and they control them, sometimes even throwing them at us in such an active manner that we feel taken aback, unsure how to respond. Sometimes, they catch us in the act of looking. They invite us to imagine how it feels to be them, and to be looked at and maybe even seen, by us and by others. You might find yourself taking a little personal pleasure at their expense, but in so doing, you may also find yourself confronted, because ultimately these are the protagonists of their own stories, and they demand that we as viewers do more than simply take pleasure in how they look. These images require more of us. They ask viewers, to play a role in their stories, and in so doing, to stand witness to their pain, pleasure, longing, and resilience–in short, to their humanity.
Danielle Fox, 2025
Sources
Berger, John, with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, Richard Hollis, Ways of Seeing, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books ltd, 1972.
Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings, pp. 833-44. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Routh, Stephanie Duprie, Daydreams in Memories of Youth, Rene’ Marcelle Publishing, 2024.
Soloway, Joey, The Female Gaze, TIFF Master Class, Toronto International Film Festival, 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/live/pnBvppooD9I?si=yKSNvWHQ_U_dSkL-
Sontag, Susan, On Photography, New York: Picador: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973
Contact
danielle@foxprojects.art
foxprojects.art