Photographers on Photographers: Quincey Spagnoletti in Dialog with Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, When A Woman Falls In love with a Banano de sangre pura, from Venas Abiertas, 2021

Every August we ask the earlier Top 25 Lenscratch Student Prize Winners to interview a hero or a mentor, providing a chance for dialog and connection. Today Quincey Spagnoletti and Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano are in dialogue. Thank you to each of the artists.

The determine of the mom serves as a strong throughline in Rachelle Anayansi Mozman-Solano’s inventive observe. Drawing on the archetype of the matriarch, her work examines motherhood as each a lived expertise and a symbolic pressure—one which shapes households, communities, and our relationship to the pure world. Through pictures, Rachelle considers the mom as a supply of creation, safety, and transformation.

I first met Rachelle whereas I used to be a graduate pupil on the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Rachelle was each considered one of my advisors and a Professor of the Practice within the Photography Department. Since graduating, I’ve continued to hunt out her steering, sharing contact sheets from my photographic tasks and discussing new concepts as they develop. She constantly affords considerate suggestions, significant perception, and beneficiant encouragement. Graduating from or leaving a tutorial establishment usually means shedding the built-in community of mentors who’re available to assist your work. Finding somebody who continues to take a position their time, consideration, and care in your inventive observe is uncommon. I’m extremely grateful to Rachelle for her ongoing mentorship and for the generosity with which she has supported my work through the years.

In this interview for Lenscratch, I had the pleasure of studying extra about Rachelle’s inventive observe and the way she balances her roles as each an educator and an artist. We talk about the methods she weaves her lived experiences collectively along with her psychoanalytic background, informing each her instructing and her inventive work in profound and compelling methods.

Mozman Solano is the recipient of the NYFA/NYSCA award in 2025, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund in 2024. She obtained the Colen Brown Art Prize and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation award in 2022. In 2021 she had a solo exhibition, All These Things I Carry with Me, at South Bend Museum, South Bend, IN. In 2020 Mozman launched her monograph, Colonial Echo with Kris Graves Projects. In 2019 she had a solo exhibition, Metamorphosis of Failure at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY. Mozman has been awarded residencies at LMCC workspace, Smack Mellon, Baxter St at CCNY, and Light Work. Mozman has been awarded the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, the NYC Film and Media Grant from the Jerome Foundation and others. Her work has been printed in Aperture, Vogue, Contact Sheet, Presumed Innocence, Exit and quite a few different publications.

Mozman Solano is a Fulbright Fellow, and has exhibited at Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Center for Photography, Kingston, NY, The Lumber Room, Portland, OR, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK, El Museo del Barrio, New York, the National Portrait Gallery at Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C, the Americas Society, New York, New York, National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York, the Chelsea Museum, New York, New York, The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, the Shore Institute of Contemporary Art, Long Branch, New Jersey, Festival de la luz on the Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina the Instituto Cultural Itau, São Paulo, Brazil, the Friese Museum, Berlin, Germany, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay, Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City, Mexico, Festival Biarritz, Biarritz, France, in addition to the IX Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador.

Instagram: @rachellemozmansolano

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Piscina, 2010

Quincey Spagnoletti: What’s one factor about instructing that has stunned you, and the way has the expertise of instructing influenced the best way you strategy your personal work?

Rachelle Mozman-Solano: Relationships are on the middle of my observe, and over time I noticed that instructing can also be about relationships. Students usually keep related or return, and this a part of instructing is one I didn’t contemplate 25 years in the past once I began as a result of I used to be targeted on discovering and conserving work. Listening to my college students who’re formed by a special world than I used to be has stunned me.

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Which was it to be sturdy, or submissive, rebellious or conforming?, from Venas Abiertas, 2021 (3)

Quincey Spagnoletti: Your work attracts not solely from your personal lived experiences, but in addition from the tales and legacies of the ladies who got here earlier than you. I’m interested by the way you strategy that sense of intergenerational connection in your inventive course of.

Rachelle Mozman-Solano: The psyche and what we feature with us from our household and ancestors experiences drives lots of my observe. I skilled as a psychoanalyst partly to know the impression of historic experiences on my household, my psychic and financial inheritance. The thoughts is a really fascinating realm and the way our lives are formed by it’s endlessly fascinating to me. My mom was all the time a thriller to me rising up. This led me to reside in Panama a number of instances, the place my mom was born and raised. It can also be the explanation I proceed to work there. Matriarchy was very highly effective in my moms household, and this appeared to return from generations previous primarily based on the oral tales informed to me. For my first monograph Colonial Echo I introduced in an interview my mom did of her mom recorded on a mini tape recorder. It was fascinating to hear again to my grandmother converse to her personal mom and ladies in her household, elevating over 11 youngsters, some weren’t her personal youngsters.

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, La Cucaracha, Soldadera, Woman Warrior, from Venas Abiertas, 2021 (4)

Quincey Spagnoletti: Your mom is a recurring character in your images. How does working together with your mother, or different relations, change or problem the narrative of your work?

Rachelle Mozman-Solano: I’m fascinated by archetypes and the operate of the mom. The mom is without doubt one of the archetypes that almost all drives my work. How the mom features in household, society, nature, to start but in addition to offer care. My personal mom can also be a singular, mysterious determine to me. She additionally occurs to be interested by performing and enjoys collaborating in my work – till she is hungry. By working with my mom somewhat than a substitute mom, I’m bringing her personal biography to the work. In this fashion, I’m within the doc and actual folks.

When working with my pal Marissa Herrmann, I’m additionally interested by Marissa’s lived expertise, and the way this bleeds into the work. She brings herself to the work, she is not only a mannequin who I’m shaping. In psychoanalysis it will be referred to as “relational theory”. Within relationships we impression one another.

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, I used to be hopeful to seek out on this place my happiness, From Cast of Women, 2018 (5)

Quincey Spagnoletti: Psychoanalysis is a giant a part of your inventive observe and your profession as an artist. Can you describe how you bought into this career and the way you deliver it into the classroom as an educator?

Rachelle Mozman-Solano: Beginning at Bennington College and now within the eight years I’ve been at SMFA at Tufts I started creating programs that intersect artwork making with psychoanalysis. In my seven years seeing sufferers I felt there was a lot creativity within the artwork of listening, in the best way analysts may help a affected person reconstruct their previous by means of phrases. Many college students in artwork college are drawn to learning artwork, to being immersed in artwork as a result of it was a method to separate from one thing of their childhood house, a method to have their very own house, safety or management. In my programs, the readings deliver up vital concepts most college students have by no means encountered. I can see the way it advantages their artwork making, to place concepts and phrases to their experiences. Psychoanalysis is a observe primarily based on language and phrases. My programs set up this connection and the outcomes may be fantastic.

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Here I’m in Panama, in wonderful well being as all the time, nonetheless from the movie Opaque Mirror, 2017 (6)

Quincey Spagnoletti: In your work, there’s all the time a component of collage. Whether you’re bodily chopping photos out and laying them on high of each other, otherwise you’re dressing your fashions up in massive minimize outs. Can you describe how your work is layered and the way you incorporate collage into your work?

Rachelle Mozman-Solano: I come from portray and went towards pictures in school, however continued portray and doing printmaking. I additionally made clothes for a few years. The collapsing of mediums and the intersecting of my curiosity in coloration, story telling, floor and chopping is on the middle of my curiosity in bringing collage to just about every little thing I do. I’m pushed by an obsession with layering – layering tales and perspectives- exhibiting how a lot there’s to contemplate in one thing that appears easy.

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Child pose, From Cast of Women, 2018 (7)

Quincey Spagnoletti: The relationship between video and pictures in your work is extremely compelling. How do these two mediums affect each other all through your inventive course of?

Rachelle Mozman-Solano: My curiosity in story telling is what drives a lot of my work. Language and phrases are a central focus in a lot of my video work. In this fashion, the images can really feel like a silent body of the video work. The depth of the historic analysis in my video work, Opaque Mirror and The Dying Cavendish, influenced how I approached my images and collages in Venas Abiertas. I then introduced this focus of language to the current ebook I printed with Kris Graves Monolith editions, titled, Venas Abiertas. In the ebook the titles seem beneath tipped in images and are the direct quotes from historic texts that formed the making of the images. There is a round manner through which I work and that these components start to impression one another.

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, California marks the restrict of geographical progress of civilization from Venas Abiertas, 2021 (8)

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Feeding bananas, Mexican Restaurant, 2025 (9)

Quincey Spagnoletti: You all the time have fantastic movie and artist suggestions for me each time we meet or have studio visits. What are you studying proper now or watching that you just assume different photographers ought to learn about?

Rachelle Mozman-Solano: Je Tu Il Elle, by Chantal Akerman is fantastic. I’m studying The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lora, and for anybody who identifies with rising up in a powerful matriarchal household construction this play may resonate.
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© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Borderlands, the place a number of worlds merge, come aside, scab over, #7 From Venas Abiertas, 2020 (10)

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Borderlands, the place a number of worlds merge, come aside, scab over, #8 From Venas Abiertas, 2020 (11)

© Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Borderlands, the place a number of worlds merge, come aside, scab over, #4, 2024
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Quincey Spagnoletti is a Boston-based photographer whose observe explores id and womanhood by means of pictures, set up, and efficiency. Rooted in her private historical past, her work combines photos of the physique with archival images from her childhood to assemble layered narratives that study reminiscence, selfhood, and illustration.

Spagnoletti obtained a BA from Colgate University and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her work has been featured in The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review, Der Greif, and Photoworks UK, amongst different publications. She is the recipient of the Levitate Foundation Emerging Visual Artist Grant (2026) the CAA Becker Fund for Visual Artists Grant (2025), and was acknowledged as considered one of Lenscratch’s Top 25 Photographers to Watch (2024) and a Top 200 Critical Mass Finalist (2024).

Most just lately, Spagnoletti was the 2025–2026 artist-in-residence at Pratt Munson College of Art & Design, the place she introduced her debut solo exhibition, Home Studio, on the Pratt Munson Gallery on the Munson Museum of Art. She will likely be an artist-in-residence at Wassaic Project in August, 2026.

Instagram: @QuinceySpagsPhoto

© Quincey Spagnoletti, Then & Now, 2025

© Quincey Spagnoletti, Climbing the Staircase, 2025

© Quincey Spagnoletti, Snowy Lines, 2025