Selfies on Steroids: Bethel Artist Creates New Niche in Santa Fe

BETHEL, CT — It’s an old story, one now with a Bethel twist. Nicole Cudzilo, local artist, didn’t really now how good she was until she moved to Santa Fe.

Cudzilo had studied fine art and photography at Western Connecticut State University. Outside of school, she studied with Laurie Klein, of Brookfield, who in turn was a student of Ansel Adams. Cudzilo's work became a fixture at shows presented by the Ridgefield Guild of Artists and the Shoreline Arts Alliance — but so was the work of many other artists. It's southwestern Connecticut, after all...

What made Cudzilo’s work quite literally unique was the subject matter: her photos were almost invariably self-portraits.

"It's definitely a specialty," the photographer said, "because self portraiture is very difficult to do, especially if you're trying to do it really well."

And that’s the way Cudzilo prefers to do it. The critics concur. Her photo series "The Edge" won first place in the self portraiture category in the 13th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. The Magazine, that arbiter of all things related to the southwestern art scene, named her one of their "12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now." And the high-end Gerald Peters Projects in Santa Fe has cleared its walls to give her work a solo showing for the whole summer. For a photographer, it's all pretty much the closest thing to being on fire that doesn't involve actual gasoline.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Self-portraiture has been Cudzilo’s focus since she was 16, but back in Bethel she also did commercial and beauty photography for clients, as well as work as a makeup artist. You need to eat.

This self-portraiture fixation is more force of habit for Cudzilo than anything else — it's been her craft since square one. Her head, she said, was "brimming with ideas from a young age," before she knew any models. She also collected the vintage clothes she featured in her shoots, and she said she found it difficult to find models to properly fit into them. Self-portaiture became the photographer's only option.

But get to know Cudzilo’s art and you realize that although the portraits are all of her, none are of herself. The women in Cudzilo’s work are characters, their story playing out across whatever landscape the photographer has chosen. She travels everywhere with a suitcase or backpack full of vintage clothes, matching whatever backgrounds she stumbles upon with the appropriate frock and wig.

"I think of it as, I’m a landscape photographer who puts myself into the photograph," she said.

The mechanics and technology behind how she does exactly that will seem remarkably analog and terribly exhausting to the megapixel smartphone selfie generation.

Cudzilo shoots old-school, with a vintage Hasselblad medium format film camera, and small wind-up timer that she affixes to its side. What follows next is exactly what you feared: the photographer triggers the timer that counts down to the shot, and then runs into place in frame and strikes her pose, hopefully before the shutter opens. Because her work is really all about the landscape, sometimes that sprint involves running up a hill or climbing a tree.

Besides introducing a level of cardio that was clearly missing from fine art for the longest time, Cudzilos's work is notable for its surreality. The fashions she chooses for her surrogate selves always seem one step out-of-phase with the landscapes they lord over, dredging up uncomfortable observations about femininity and conformity, and nature and control.

In February 2018, she headed westward in the footsteps of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz and took a seasonal job at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, doing odd jobs in exchange for free classes. But Santa Fe cast its spell, as Santa Fe is wont to do. For Cudzilo, the magic was mostly a trick of the light.

"I was just amazed with the quality of light that's here. Being a photographer, I feel like that's one of the most inspiring and important things. Scientifically. I feel like it's probably to do with the altitude. You know, we're so high up and the light is coming through the atmosphere in a different way, but it just looks and feels so different and the colors are amplified and the way that things reflect off of the desert is amplified," she said.

"It feels like there's a magical energy here. People always say it's the Land of Enchantment, but it’s the land of entrapment when you come to visit."

So she came home to Bethel, packed her bags and moved back to Santa Fe. Based upon her trajectory there, it looks like this move may be for good.

The work of Nicole Cudzilo will be on exhibit at Gerald Peters Projects, 1011 Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe, NM, from June 21 through August 24.