| EPISODE 7: SET WITH SUBJECT || A.2: NARRATIVE FIELDWORK |

Film Essay

Set with Subject operates at the intersection of fashion photography and portraiture, blurring distinctions between staged image-making and the historical conventions of representational fidelity. Simultaneously a fashion shoot and a portrait, the collage series engages the subject not merely as sitter or model, but as a constructed presence within a mediated mise-en-scène. It interrogates the politics of display, pose, and authorship, where the apparatus of the shoot—its sets, styling, and framing—becomes inseparable from the subject's image. In collapsing genre boundaries, Set with Subject reflects on how identity, desire, and visibility are negotiated through stylized surfaces, implicating both viewer and subject in the aesthetics of self-fashioning.

Act

Act 2: Narrative Fieldwork | Agile Cinema® situates itself within the unstable terrain of cultural historiography, echoing Phil Graham’s reflection on the impossibility of fully capturing the present: “a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed.” In this spirit, Agile Cinema®’s interviews and micro-films operate as polyvocal, multi-channel, and time-based interventions—advertising campaigns in form, yet refusing the extractive logics of conventional media circulation. Rather than instrumentalize subjects for content, these works unfold through durational engagement—three months to a year of building trust, solidarity, and shared authorship with artists, curators, musicians, scholars, and cultural practitioners. The result is not reportage but relational media: slow, dialogic, and reflexive. At its best, the process becomes cathartic—an act of mutual recognition, wherein individuals are seen and heard on their own terms, yet reframed through the speculative lens of cinema. This practice stands in direct resistance to the hyper-accelerated economies of content production and consumption—what might be called the wham-bam churn of digital capitalism, which flattens attention, bodies, and meaning into disposable units of engagement. Against this backdrop, Narrative Fieldwork asserts the radical potential of slowness, presence, and co-authorship: a counter-cinematic gesture that insists on the dignity of process over product, and the irreducible complexity of human narrative over algorithmic simplicity.

Information

Double-Sided Collages | 4 x 4″ | 8 x 8" | 20 x 20" | 36 x 36"

No items found.

Bricolage

Collage, Montage, Assemblage

Vera Maurina Press