Boren Banner Series: Camille Trautman @ The Frye

For their first solo museum exhibition in Seattle, Duwamish artist Camille Trautman turns photography and video into a meditation on visibility, identity, and history. On view as part of the Frye Art Museum’s Boren Banner Series, Trautman’s work asks visitors to reconsider the neutrality of photography and the power of framing to shape narratives both cultural and personal.

The exhibition features selections from Trautman’s ongoing series, “The North American LCD,” ghostly self-portraits staged in mossy, verdant landscapes. In these black-and-white images, Trautman’s body — blurred by movement or glowing from within — is partially obscured by large LCD screens. The tones and blurs recall the work of Francesca Woodman, while the screens are unmistakably contemporary.

“I use LCDs to construct my own landscape and create a space for my body, as an act of resistance against colonial representations,” Trautman explains. Screens, they continue, “serve as an alternative to mirrors for self-reflection — they present an alluring yet dissociative vision. A way of mediating how I, and other trans people, perceive our own bodies in the world.”

By combining portraiture and landscape, Trautman interrogates photography’s historical role as an imperial tool. Lush, depopulated landscapes have often been used to erase human presence and misrepresent cultural heritage. Trautman’s banners confront these histories while asserting presence and identity in contemporary space, creating a visual dialogue between past and present, visibility and erasure.