Molly Dickler

I was raised in Los Angeles. For two years I went to California College of the Arts and studied Fashion, then switched to Photography. As a photographer, I have experimented with lots of genres and styles, including self-portraits, portraits, fashion, urban landscape, animals, and journalism. I started at Otis in 2018 as a Fine Art Photography major. Since 2019, I’ve been creating self-portraits. I began by taking photos of myself wearing my late grandmother's clothes. The series was called Housewife. I thought of my grandma and what she would do or I would just wear her clothes and act like her. When I did this I started to get sad. The more I took photos of myself in her clothes telling her story, the more I realized I wanted to tell my own story. For my next series, Loss of a Loved One, I revisited events that I still think about, that were for me traumatic, and to also invent traumatic events. I had a few different ideas about how to do this. One was to stage whole scenes. I soon realized that would be impossible. As I looked through my photo library, I decided I could project scenes I had photographed on the wall and then use props and costumes to complete the scenes. The advantage of this approach is that it made the events, real or imagined, look like memories of events instead of documentary photographs of events. My father passed away on February 26, 2021. To honor him, I made a video out of all the phone videos I had taken of him over the years.