Why Marjorie Salvaterra is in the Design 100

Marjorie Salvaterra works from Los Angeles, where her black-and-white fine art photography is built on staging rather than the snapshot. Her breakthrough series, HER, gathers women into tightly choreographed group compositions, costumed and posed with a theatrical, cinematic control, and was published in 2016 as the book HER: Meditations on Being Female. The Getty Center’s Virginia Heckart has described the results as tracing a fine line between sanity and insanity, a tension that runs through work reading less like documentation than notation for a dance not yet resolved.

That practice is represented by Ralph Pucci International, alongside Ralph Pucci himself, another name in this index. Salvaterra’s photographs have also been shown at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, the Griffin Museum of Photography and Rencontres d’Arles, and she was named one of LensCulture’s Top 50 Emerging Artists. Return often enough to the same choreography of women, and the pattern starts to say more than any single portrait could.