Kacey Jeffers

Basement  reimagines the go-see—a term used in the modeling industry to describe informal castings where models present themselves to clients—as an intimate study of identity and agency. Over the course of a week, models represented by Next Model Management arrived at my apartment with instructions to bring their own clothes. Without stylists, hair, or makeup artists, I photographed them in the basement of my building. Yet even in these stripped-down representations, my presence as the photographer and the act of being observed raise the question: Is a model ever fully in control of their own likeness? The project examines fashion’s performative nature and photography’s complicity in shaping it.