Index

I make self-portraits to understand what it’s like to live in one body that is also part of something larger: the land, the people I love, what I’ve inherited, and time.

In the photographs my body becomes landscape, and sometimes a membrane, a place where things meet. Water, cloth, myth, and grief leave their marks, and who I am shifts with them.

Much of the work is about agency inside conditions I can’t control. Sometimes that means choosing. Sometimes it means witnessing, tending, or deciding how to live inside what I can’t leave. Myth gives me a way into those questions without turning the photographs into illustrations of a story.

Bodies and landscapes are shaped by the same slow forces, like erosion and growth. I think of that as kinship.

Making this work has given me a more solid sense of self, one that can hold motherhood, neurodivergence, art, and my cycles of descent and emergence. Part of my nature is that I’m always changing, and I’m learning to come home to that.

I hope it leaves you more curious about yourself, and less alone.

Fruiting Body is an evolving digital exhibition and archive of my photographic work and poetry.

A fruiting body is the visible, temporary structure through which a larger living system emerges. I think of the works the same way: individual manifestations of longer processes of embodiment, memory, ecology, relationship, and change.

The museum is organized by theme, visual form, and states of transformation rather than chronology. Bodies, landscapes, water, thresholds, cycles, and acts of witnessing return across projects made at different times and under different circumstances.

The site lets each body of work stay distinct while making their deeper relationships visible.

Each body of work usually begins with a question, a physical state, or something I can’t quite reach through language. I carry it into a material, a place, a gesture, or a repeated action, and let my body enter it first.

Posing for the camera made me so self-conscious I could barely work. I found my stride when I began treating each shoot as a moving meditation: a real-time exploration of an idea through materials and surroundings.

I rarely previsualize individual photographs. I often use video, burst capture, or rapid sequences so the encounter can keep moving without stopping to compose each frame. The camera acts as both mirror and witness. It records what I am doing and returns something I couldn’t fully perceive from inside the experience.

Selection comes afterward. Looking through the images often tells me things I didn’t know while I was making them. The photographs become traces of the encounter and a way of discovering what happened there.

Most images are minimally edited. When blur, distortion, light leaks, reflections, or other accidents belong to the inquiry, I keep them as they were captured. The Fall is a frame from the moment I knocked over my tripod mid-shoot. I hadn’t known how to make an image of Persephone’s descent; looking back through the footage, this frame held the instability of that moment exactly, and I loved that its title became true in more ways than one.

Body of Water is the exception, with more extensive editing of light, contrast, and sharpness.

A Miscarriage and Phase were made with tintype-style editing techniques I learned from photographer Catherine Just.

Hades and The Return, from This Morning I Was Gathering Daffodils, are digital collages built from my own photographic footage. Their color and tone draw on Renaissance and Baroque painting.

Abby Buchanan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon, working primarily in self-portrait photography, alongside film, sound and writing.

After two decades as a licensed massage therapist and bodyworker, she began using photography as a form of embodied inquiry. Her work draws on motherhood, neurodivergence, myth, and the natural world.