Regan Rudman Portfolio - The Yellow Ribbon

The Yellow Ribbon

Once there was a girl. She was just like all the other girls, except for one thing. She always wore a yellow ribbon on her neck. If she took off the ribbon, her head would fall off. It was the only thing keeping it in place. She held the keys to her own destruction.

The Girl With the Yellow Ribbon explores feminine identity, self-alienation, images of the uncanny, and displacement. With the photographer also serving as the model, this project evokes powerlessness and wrestles with the question of agency. It also centers a doll-like subject trapped between floral imagery and the decrepit setting she inhabits.

The story of “The Girl With the Green Ribbon” is a famous oral tradition codified in Alvin Schwartz’ “In a Dark, Dark Room,” but the tale has existed since the French Revolution as a parable against materialist excess evoking the abject uncanny of heads rolling. I was inspired by this mythology and chose the basement location as a liminal space to further evoke a strange uncanny feeling of the decrepit and wilting.

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