Sour-Puss: The Opera is the result of a five-year collaboration between artist duo Diogo Duarte and Jessica Mitchell, who also work in mental health. Published by GOST Books in 2021, the 148-page hardcover combines photographs, drawings, and texts. The ‘Sour-Puss’ of the title is a composite character, sometimes based on the real-life Mitchell and the real-life Duarte and their experiences. Duarte and Mitchell were colleagues, then friends; the character emerged gradually through conversations and arguments in which they found similarities in worldview and a mutual dislike of ‘positive thinking’.
The composite character carries both biographical and fictional traits. According to the publisher, she was created to expose hypocrisies and inconsistencies within normative power structures. Sour-Puss does not wish to ‘accept’ or ‘assimilate’ mainstream versions of gender and sexuality; the text describes the character as queer in the truest sense. The book does not present her as a case to be solved or a persona to be decoded. Instead, photographs, drawings, and written passages accumulate without one form simply illustrating another.
Diogo Duarte has described the gaze in the photographs as contested. Although his framing is irrevocably his, he has said that conceptually the gaze is not only his but theirs, and that this shared authorship is what makes the collaboration unique. The story of the woman in the photographs and her drawings, her narrative, arose from many hours of conversation with Jessica about pain and repression, but also about happiness and freedom.
Jessica Mitchell has spoken about the honest and challenging conversations the series prompted, and about the surprise some people express that anyone would photograph a woman who looks like her. She links this to how middle-aged women can appear uncategorizable, cut loose from roles society imposes. Sour-Puss embodies that possibility—that she might do anything—without softening it into inspiration. The book is a substantial hardcover volume and a sustained exercise in shared authorship, with photographs, drawings, and texts held together by a difficult, unaccommodating character.
