There is a portrait of my wife on the wall of our workshop. It got there because we were fighting.

We share the space. Nisha works in encaustic. I make portraits. One afternoon we were arguing about the room. About the mess. About where her materials should live. About whose practice the room actually belonged to.

She didn't keep arguing. She walked over to a print I had made of her, put it on the wall, and wrote on a piece of paper, by hand:

I am The Boss Of This Room.

She drew an arrow pointing at the portrait. And she taped the sign next to it.

That was the end of the fight.

I stood there and looked at what she had done, and I understood something I had not fully understood before about my own work. She had not claimed the room with a sign. She had claimed it with the portrait. The sign was just the caption.

The photograph was the authority.

She knew, instinctively, what a portrait is for. Not decoration. Not a flattering image to mark an occasion. Standing. A way of being held up in a room that might otherwise forget you.

Most women have never been photographed this way. Not because they wouldn't want to be. Because no one ever offered it to them as something serious. Something that could hold weight, settle an argument, occupy a wall.

That is the work I do.

The portrait is still on the wall. So is the sign. Neither of us has moved them.

A longer reflection on this piece is published on Medium. Read it →