ICSA TODAY 20
Photography/Art
My work is about the loss of feminine agency
that occurred in my youth growing up in the
infamous Unification Church, a religious group
referred to by popular media as “the Moonies”
and as a primary example of a cult, and the
internal landscape resulting from that loss. This
experience had a lasting effect on my psyche and
sense of identity, and it is through writing and
photography that I work through these effects.
Growing up in my insular community of religious
fanaticism and charismatic, dangerous, self-
styled messiahs, I was intimately familiar with
precise, though backwards, logic. My journey
into adulthood saw me plunging headfirst to-
wards confronting those dangerous, faulty forms
and proofs, unraveling the colorful spectacles of
my childhood until only a tired and tattered man-
behind-the-curtain remained.
My photographs are about those transitions and
discoveries. They chronicle moments of fear, of
awakening.
Burdens of a White Dress, the series from which
these photographs are selected, is a set of surreal
self-portraits that reflect being born in a fringe
religious movement. The project’s title refers to
the emphasis placed on a woman’s role in my
childhood. A woman’s value was intrinsically tied
to her purity and virginity after marriage that
value shifted into the realm of motherhood. By
using a square format and a stark palette, violent-
ly splashed with red, I explore the concepts of
shame, of evil, and of the wantonness that was
projected upon me growing up in the Unification
faith.
Because this was my own personal experience
of leaving a repressive religious environment,
I often use myself as a model. My body is then
contorted or manipulated to demonstrate the in-
ternal effects of the struggle that it is to free one’s
mind from a controlling belief system and to
demonstrate the repressed place that femininity
had in my world. n
Burdens of a White Dress
By Jen Kiaba
Photography/Art
My work is about the loss of feminine agency
that occurred in my youth growing up in the
infamous Unification Church, a religious group
referred to by popular media as “the Moonies”
and as a primary example of a cult, and the
internal landscape resulting from that loss. This
experience had a lasting effect on my psyche and
sense of identity, and it is through writing and
photography that I work through these effects.
Growing up in my insular community of religious
fanaticism and charismatic, dangerous, self-
styled messiahs, I was intimately familiar with
precise, though backwards, logic. My journey
into adulthood saw me plunging headfirst to-
wards confronting those dangerous, faulty forms
and proofs, unraveling the colorful spectacles of
my childhood until only a tired and tattered man-
behind-the-curtain remained.
My photographs are about those transitions and
discoveries. They chronicle moments of fear, of
awakening.
Burdens of a White Dress, the series from which
these photographs are selected, is a set of surreal
self-portraits that reflect being born in a fringe
religious movement. The project’s title refers to
the emphasis placed on a woman’s role in my
childhood. A woman’s value was intrinsically tied
to her purity and virginity after marriage that
value shifted into the realm of motherhood. By
using a square format and a stark palette, violent-
ly splashed with red, I explore the concepts of
shame, of evil, and of the wantonness that was
projected upon me growing up in the Unification
faith.
Because this was my own personal experience
of leaving a repressive religious environment,
I often use myself as a model. My body is then
contorted or manipulated to demonstrate the in-
ternal effects of the struggle that it is to free one’s
mind from a controlling belief system and to
demonstrate the repressed place that femininity
had in my world. n
Burdens of a White Dress
By Jen Kiaba
