41786 artMattersV2 - School of the Museum of Fine Arts

Brianne Brophy
Given the choice of photographing a patient on an
operating room table or drawing the person on the pages
of her sketchbook, Brianne Brophy would typically have
picked up a pencil. Now, however, after several missions
to hospitals in the Philippines, Bolivia, Bangkok, and
India, she just might reach for a camera.
“I went into those operating rooms believing I would
use the small pocket camera as a notebook to bring back
raw images to work with in other ways,” says Brophy
(Bachelor of Fine Arts student), “but I soon found myself
becoming attached to the images I was able to create
and, ultimately, control.”
On the recommendation of a friend, Brophy has interrupted
her studies for weeks at a time over the last few
years to work with Operation Smile. The international
charity’s medical teams repair deformities like cleft lip
and cleft palate that cause children to struggle with
basic functions like eating, drinking, and speaking, but
also with social interactions. Brophy documents each
child’s progress through surgery and follow-up care.
The cramped operating rooms offered less-than-ideal
conditions, Brophy says, with harsh lighting and sight
lines crowded by doctors, anesthesiologists, and nurses.
The blue/green sea of the surgical field also didn’t
help. “But working in such unpredictable conditions
taught me a lot about being flexible and taking charge,”
she says. “It really does make you fearless.”
impressed not only by Brophy’s skill, but by the symmetry
in her work.
“The photographs, of course, grabbed everyone
immediately,” Dow says. “They are powerful and wellexecuted
despite being made in what sometimes
approaches battlefield extremes. Looking from the walls
of close-ups of lips, teeth, and mouths, with ranks of
sutures, clamps, gauze padding, and a full complement
of blood, across to the gesturally loquacious drawings,
it was impossible not to connect them.”
Dow describes a “fascinating congruity” between
Brophy’s photography and drawing. “Besides a powerful
tension between the indexical surgical images and the
expressive realism of the drawings, the colors, shading,
play of light, etc., all speak to a similarity of treatment.”
Brophy also sees ways in which her expressive work
is connected, and how the lives of the children she
has met will continue to influence her aesthetic. The
next step is to revisit families in their “new lives.”
“Every time I get home from a mission and add new
images to the whole body of work, I feel like I’m closer
to putting together a complete story,” she says, musing
about the possibility of turning her images into a book.
On the last day of a two-week mission to Calcutta,
Brophy wandered around the hospital with her camera
subtly positioned at her hip. She hoped to discretely
capture a few post-operative images. One of the parents
saw her and motioned for her to take his portrait holding
his son.
Brophy was surprised by the unusual request, more
accustomed to parents who, at initial screenings, would
cover their children’s faces with scarves or their hands.
But she happily complied, then displayed the tiny
image on her camera screen. “The father grinned ear
to ear,” Brophy says. “Other parents gathered to see
the picture and, before I knew it, a crowd gathered
around me, all wanting family portraits!” ❖
For additional images and information about Operation
Smile, visit www.smfa.edu.
above: brianne brophy, Untitled (Philippines),
2006. Digital print. 13 x 19 inches.
below: brianne brophy, Untitled (Bolivia), 2006.
Digital print. 13 x 19 inches.
On the Museum School campus, Brophy’s studio work
initially focused on figure drawing. She also developed
what she considered a basic understanding of photography,
but that never satisfied her enough to be a
creative outlet. Rather, she portrayed human forms in
graphite and charcoal, eventually shifting toward
costume design and incorporating images of stitching
and sewing.
“I moved back and forth between the body and what
it wears,” Brophy says. “When I came across this chance
to be in an operating room, it immediately spoke to my
love of anatomy and physiology, as well as offered me
a rare opportunity to witness actual sewing of a body.
It brought my previous work full circle. And in doing so,
it primed me to feel a level of comfort with a camera
that I’d never had before.”
In May, Jim Dow (Faculty) evaluated Brophy’s body of
work from the Museum School during her Review Board,
which included her images from OpSmile as well as
her artist’s books, large-scale drawings, paintings,
and smaller sketches of the human form. Dow was
www.smfa.edu 3