on being in an enviable position

As sins go, envy is one of the more confounding, pulling us out of ourselves and forcing us to pine impotently for we believe we cannot have, or cannot be. It’s an imaginary realm, dislocated and disturbing – and most cruel in that the object or status we desire could be merely a distraction from our own self-pity over the fact that someone else has gotten there first.

That’s what’s truly alarming about envy – that it can be self-contained.

“Envy is the artist’s playground,” says photographer Cathrine Westergaard. “We strive to capture our subjects’ allure by identifying those aspects, drawing them out, enhancing them through subtle direction – details we notice in the first place perhaps because we covet them.”

“Here we were drawn towards capturing a woman’s internal struggle,” Westergaard continues, describing the scene at partner Nathaniel Kramer’s home in East Hampton, where the two artists discovered a collaborative energy and mutual admiration quite opposite to the aims of their shoot: to expose the perverse envy women discover when living a life driven by intellect and conditioning rather than by truth and passion.

“That’s the modern woman’s challenge in a ‘have-it-all’ culture,” she says, referring also to the challenges she and Kramer faced in this sixteen-hour shoot for Spirit & Flesh. “We yearn to feel complete, even as the lifestyles, bodies and excitement parading by us clash with our unfulfilled desire for wild freedom and our need to live by restrictive social expectations.

“Envy is part of that clash, seen through the mind of the ‘good girl’: Does she merely observe life from the sidelines while her twin/opposite thrives? Does envy frustrate her toward self-destruction? Or does she simply yearn for what she can have only by losing herself?”