Andina Marie Osorio: Portraiture Through Still Life and Living Archive.
- Monica Loughman
- Aug 8
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 9
Andina Marie Osorio is an Afro-Caribbean artist from the Bronx, currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York.. In 2024 ,Osorio earned her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the Yale School of Art. After graduating, she was an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Fire Island Artist Residency, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Her work has been exhibited at the LES Gallery at The Clemente, Webber Gallery, and Anonymous Gallery, and has been featured in publications like Port Magazine and Elephant Magazine. She was awarded the Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund and was a finalist for The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers
In the following conversation, Osorio reflects on three of her bodies of work: A Collection of Life, Things Men Don’t Know, and I’m So Glad You’re Here. Throughout our conversation she offers insight into her conceptual approach to photography (specifically portraiture.) Osorio contextualizes the invisible labor of domestic life through the objects one owns, works with, and touches. She examines how these material and conceptual traces are recorded in her family’s multigenerational photographic archive, and extends - and at times challenges - that lineage by documenting her own life as part of its ongoing evolution.
ML: A Collection of Life is your earliest ongoing body of work, and perhaps a good place to start our conversation. Can you talk about the spaces that appear in these images, the objects within them, and their relationship to the individuals who dwell in those spaces?
AMO: Yeah, for sure. To talk about that work, I’d have to go back to around 2018. I was born in the Bronx, raised in Mount Vernon, but most of my family lives in the Bronx - specifically the East Bronx: Co-Op City, Baychester, the Parkchester area.
My godmother’s mother, my great-aunt, lives in Co-Op City, and that place is really special. It’s technically a housing project, but it's also kind of a fascinating social experiment in a way. The community is mostly made up of older folks, either primarily Puerto Rican or other Spanish speakers, and older Black residents.
In 2018, I was still an undergrad, and my godmother called me. At the time, my work was really focused on family and portraiture. She told me, “If you want to photograph your great-aunt’s apartment, now’s the time.” She was getting older and starting to have some mobility issues, so they were going to have to start moving things around.
I’m really glad she said that. I ended up taking a still life of her apartment. At the time, I didn’t fully realize what that photograph was doing or what it would come to mean. It became the foundation for everything that followed.
Fast forward to the early days of COVID: my friend had a grandmother who had passed due to a stroke. My friend called me after a few days and said, “Can you come over and photograph the house?”
That moment was significant. What this work has taught me is that grief has many forms and one of them is in the dismantling of a home. Whether it’s due to death or migration, there’s a very specific kind of loss that happens. I think women, especially of a certain age, have a unique relationship to possession, to objects, to material memory. That ephemerality. It’s different from how others experience it.
ML: Your work seems deeply attuned to those ephemeral relationships.
AMO: Exactly. My friend's grandmother, for example, had been an intimate wear professor at FIT (which is where I went for undergrad.) She was also an artist; she was an illustrator and she made things. So, when you look at the images I took, there are bobbins, scissors, sewing materials. All of that was part of her artistic practice.
That opened something up for me. It made me think about grief, ephemera, and the idea of making a portrait through objects. A lot of my work deals with the domestic, the matrix, and the invisible labor of women within the home. That kind of care and creativity that doesn't always get acknowledged.
So I started asking: how do you make a portrait of a person when their physical body isn’t there? How do you represent someone through the things they touched, the things they gave meaning to?
ML: That’s such a powerful framework in which to place your practice.
AMO: Thank you. For me, this series represents my purest understanding of photography. I don’t move anything. I don’t style or arrange the scene. Everything is left exactly as it was. I want to honor those spaces as they are because the presence is already there.
Photography, in this context, has become a tool of healing. It doesn’t erase grief, but I think it helps ease the process of letting go. That was certainly the case for my friend when I photographed her grandmother’s house.
This body of work, A Collection of Life, is something I see myself continuing for the next ten or twenty years. It’s been a very local project so far, mostly within New York State, but I’d love for it to grow. My dream is to eventually see it expand to all 50 states, and maybe even globally.
ML: I really enjoy this approach to portraiture. Photographing the space in which somebody lives, things they have, and even how they arrange those things as a way of capturing a person and the different roles they lead in life.
AMO: What’s fun about this, and what I hope to continue, is that there’s a really interesting dynamic. Depending on whether it's the suburbs, an urban area, a woman of color, a white woman, an affluent white woman-the way space is utilized really differs. And I like building this anthology of how women of different backgrounds function in their own domestic arrangements.
ML: That’s really fascinating. Can you talk more about this anthology as it relates to your series Things Men Don’t Know.
AOM: Yeah, that project’s one of my favorites. It combines so many different ways of thinking and seeing that I’ve been trying to develop for a really long time. When I was first studying photography, I became a sort of familial photographer and archivist. I grew up knowing we had all these photographs in these huge Home Depot bins, but they weren’t being taken care of. Yet they held this lush, expansive catalog of my family history.
So, I started collecting them without knowing what I wanted to do for a long time. Now I realize that my archive plays a role in basically my entire practice, but specifically with this project.
I was using a quote from The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison in this project, one that I’ve been thinking about for years. There’s a segment told from the perspective of a woman about how she married this man who didn’t understand her, and how nobody understands what it takes to make a home. That resonated deeply with how my mother, grandmother, and other women in my family felt. This kind of invisible labor that goes unrecognized.
ML: There looks to be material deterioration. Can you speak more about that effect?
I love honeybees. They’re fascinating insects and are one of the only organisms that are matriarchal. All honeybees are female; male bees are drones and live in a completely different hive. The way honeybees function fascinates me; their communication, the way they dance, the fact that they can democratically elect or reject their queen. They do what benefits each other and the domestic space of the hive. That kind of collective domestic care reminded me of how I was raised by women who came together to do what was best for the family.
For a long time, I was trying to figure out how to use bees as collaborators. I worked with honey and sculptures, and during my research, I found this technique used in beekeeping. When keepers want to merge two hives, they put newsprint between the two hives to let them get used to each other. The bees will tear through the paper, because it’s a foreign body and part of their work is cleaning, and if they accept each other, they’ll merge into one hive.
That gave me the idea to print some of my archival photos on newsprint and place them in beehives. It took years to find a beekeeper who was open to it but finally, in grad school, I found someone. Initially, I just wanted short videos of bees working on the paper. But the beekeeper started texting me every day, saying, “Do you want me to take it out now?” When we did, we had these beautiful pieces. What looks like perforated edges on the images is where the bees tore away the paper to clean and potential merge.
ML: The way you were able to merge visuals of women who lived that invisible labor of domesticity with the physical evidence of the bee’s cleaning, protecting, and coming together is so layered and poignant. There's a strong sense of deterioration through duty, sadness and personal strength.
In I’m So Glad You’re Here you incorporate images from that same familial archive with images from your own life, from your own archives. Can you talk about this body of work and what interests are informing this ongoing archive?
AOM: I’m So Glad You’re Here is new, but not entirely. A lot of the formal photos I’m taking now are new, but the archives have been in the works for a long time. I didn’t even realize I was working with an archive until after grad school, when I was preparing for an artist talk at CPW (Center for Photography Woodstock.) I wanted to do a big deep dive into my practice, and that’s when I realized—I’ve been using these archives the whole time.
I’ve been collecting family photographs and also taking snapshots of my life since undergrad, around 2017 or 2018. I love archives for many reasons, but especially for how they invite fantasy. I’m really lucky to have a family archive that’s extensive but I’ve also been documenting my life - being queer, being from New York. I’m thinking about chosen family, romantic life, friendship, and how all that merges. I’m interested in time and how it’s both refractive and linear. And I shoot everything on film, which helps blur the temporal lines. Some photos scream “1974,” others feel more recent, but the film gives a quality that melds time frames together.
I love environmental portraits and still lifes, but lately I’ve been drawn to ideas of protection and refusal. I use so much of my life in this work. Family history, intimacy. So, I like the idea of not showing full figures in the formal photos. The back of the head, for instance. I call it the “queerification of the back of the head.” Photographers like Al Pérez and Cathie Opie do this too. It’s such a vulnerable spot. There’s something about being a welcomed intruder, about entering a moment you weren’t supposed to witness, but are allowed to be in. That gaze, not being reciprocated, builds tension. It’s also safer to eroticize someone you don’t fully see. There’s less confrontation. It creates space for fantasy.
ML: You’ve been up to a lot this last year! You graduated from Yale Spring of 2024, and have since held residency at Sharpe Walentas, Center for Photography in Woodstock, and Fire Island Artist Residency. What was your process for applying? Did you target these residencies specifically, or apply widely?
AOM: Honestly? I went all in. I applied to so many residencies back before I went to Grad School and didn’t get in. I was frustrated, but I understand now that the work just wasn’t there yet. Grad school helped shape it, so I applied widely. I have complicated feelings about Yale Photo, but I have to give them their flowers. I wouldn’t be the artist I am without that program.
What I’ve learned is: don’t apply to residencies just to apply. It’s a waste of everyone’s time if the fit isn’t right. It’s important to be intentional. Apply where the environment and resources match the work you want to make.
It was a whirlwind—thesis in April, graduation in May, packed up the studio in June, then Fire Island in July. I was home for ten days, did our NYC thesis show, then Woodstock in August, and then Sharp Walentas. It was wild. But it felt right. Like, in some universe, I was always meant to do this.
To keep up with Andina marie Osorio visit her website at https://www.andinamarie.com or follow on instagram @andinamarieosorio .
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