Orlando DIY mainstay Sabra Starr exhibits emotional photographic work in ‘Corpo Fantasma’

Sabra Starr is a familiar face to those acquainted with Orlando’s DIY scene. I think I first met her around 2014, when she was organizing community, feminist, zine-making workshops under the moniker Tittie-Thyme. The photographer and musician, who has recently recovered from Stage IV breast cancer, is sharing an intimate glimpse into her art and life over the past three years.

Starr says her upcoming photo-centric installation, Corpo Fantasma, is a timeline: “From diagnosis to remission and PTSD. Three years.”

Let’s wade into her timeline. It’s fall 2020. Starr is in her early 30s. She is diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer. She starts chemo. She repeatedly goes under the knife. She loses a friend to cancer. She loses another friend to a tragic accident. She turns to photography to document her experience, favoring an old Minolta XG-1 film camera she refurbished herself.

For Starr, her photography is “a desperate attempt to hang on.”

“Unruly, hazy, light-leaked and faded ... The expired-film photos I took look how my brain felt.”

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“I rediscovered my love for photography when looking for a way to process my medical trauma during my cancer treatment.” Starr says. She is thinking about expiration, broadly, and is shooting with expired 35mm film.

“I thought the effect the expired film created could be unruly, hazy, light-leaked and faded," she says. "The expired photos I took look how my brain felt.”

She continues to create visual manifestations of the brain fog she experienced during treatment and recovery, playing with multiple exposures and an intentional lack of focus in the images she makes.

In one hazy, black-and-white double exposure (seen above), taken on an SLR, a thicket of palm trees is overlaid with a wide-angle shot that appears at first glance to be a reflective surface. As the viewer's eyes focus on the photograph, they may make out a small figure standing, looking at the camera, toward the left side of the frame and perpendicular to a rectangle of reflected light.

This is one of Starr’s double-exposed portraits of her close friend, Ashley. This one was taken here in Orlando, before Ashley moved to Brooklyn the week Starr received her diagnosis. She has many similar images of Ashley, who has flown back for each one of Starr’s surgeries and birthdays since. A repetition of subjects is a hallmark of Starr’s work.

Starr shot most of the photographs for Corpo Fantasma during active treatment, and many of them are portraits.

“The majority of portraits I’ve taken are of people I love. My caretakers," she remembers. "People who have been there for me in big ways. I had a friend who drove two hours every weekend [that] I was in treatment to be there with me, do my laundry, sweep my floors, and just be there while I cried. She shows up in my art a lot in this series.”

Starr sees her portraits as visualizations of gratitude for the humans who have stayed by her side.

Starr’s photographic practice has made me reflect on Park McArthur’s Other Forms of Conviviality. McArthur, a wheelchair user, similarly documents the rituals of care her close friends participate in, framing them as scores:

SCORE FOR LIFT AND TRANSFER
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Work to deliver your bodies safely from platform to platform, surface to surface.
Hold yourself; stand.
Stand and hold yourself while holding someone else.
Learn how the you of your body and me of mine work our mutual instability together. Learn how the instability of holding while moving is a moment.
Learn that to move is to hold a we.
When we are crossing, dressing, lifting, rounding, it reminds me how rarely I share this kind of coordinated unstable touching, these routine experimentations, with others besides Amalle. What contexts, proximities, and spaces permit the sharing of these simple actions?

For Corpo Fantasma, Starr presents her photo work as an installation, with a soundscape provided by local ambient/experimental musician La Science des Reves. Viewing her work in such an immersive setting, surrounded — as Starr was and is — by a constellation of friends and treasured loved ones makes perfect sense.

“This originally started as a way for me to process everything that’s happened. And though I’m still dealing with the effects of it all, I want it to be a safe place for other chronically ill people to feel seen," offers Starr. "Not to be an inspiration or to inspire anyone. I just want to create a space where it’s safe to feel.”

The opening reception for Corpo Fantasma goes from from 6-10 p.m. Friday, Sept. 29. The installation will also be on view from 3-8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 30. On that Saturday, Starr will give an artist talk at 4 p.m.


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