Published in 2018, John Botte’s One Woman is built around a sustained collaboration with Elicia Ho, a former ballerina who acts not simply as a sitter but as the active center of the book’s inquiry into identity. Across a series of staged portraits, Ho assumes figures drawn from family history, cultural memory, art, politics, and cinema. The premise is exacting: one subject becomes the meeting place for many inherited, remembered, and imagined selves.
The personas range from Ho’s American mother and anthropologist grandmother to her Chinese aunties in traditional cheongsam. Elsewhere she evokes the Balanchine ballerina and the Hollywood siren, alongside figures including Josephine Baker, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Gloria Steinem. These portraits are less straightforward impersonations than acknowledgments of the women and archetypes through which a life may understand itself. Ho’s short accompanying texts clarify the personal meaning of each transformation without closing down the photographs’ ambiguities.
Botte renders the series in richly modulated monochrome, using controlled light and vintage optics to summon different periods and emotional registers. The formal vocabulary recalls the cultivated studio portraiture of Studio Harcourt and Cecil Beaton, as well as the pronounced silhouettes associated with 1930s photography. Technical notes describe his exclusive use of the Leica M Monochrom for the project, making the volume an account of photographic craft as well as a study of performance before the camera.
For collectors, the book’s significance lies in the concentration of its proposition. Rather than surveying a career or a genre, it follows one photographer-subject relationship through a deliberately varied set of identities. The resulting monograph brings classical portrait conventions into conversation with self-fashioning, family lineage, cultural inheritance, and female autonomy. Published by G Editions LLC as a hardcover volume, One Woman rewards attention both as a unified body of portraiture and as a record of how image-making can become a collaborative form of self-examination.
