Andrew O’Brien, Self Portrait As A Clown, With A Cow Prop, 1/3, 2026, Inkjet on Moab Juniper Baryta Rag, 16 x 20 inches

Drew O’Brien is a fine art photographer based in Maine working with elements of staged self-portraiture, collage and digital painting techniques to explore how myth and imposed narratives shape the self. He holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from Colby College and studied architecture at Yale University, influences that inform his attention to structure and language as much as image. He lives in Cape Elizabeth.

Currently, I am working on a series of digital self-portrait collages — using found imagery, book illustrations, and hand-drawn digital elements — creating compositions that move between the personal and the mythological, the everyday and the archetypal. These works sit with a fundamental tension: we inhabit a physical body, tangible and corporeal, while simultaneously living inside a self constructed narrative that is formed from archetypes, from myths of gender, from societal roles and inherited symbols. Neither version is wholly real. Both are a form of fabrication. And yet both are essential to existence.

The self-portrait has always been a site of inquiry into what a person is — where the individual ends and the symbol begins. What narrative structures do we employ to organize our sense of self? These works are tableaux, in keeping with the tradition of early photographic studio portraiture with its scenic backdrops and deliberate props — but where that tradition sought to fix the subject, the figures here are suspended mid-construction, neither fully anchored in the body nor fully dissolved into myth.

What emerges is not entirely self-portrait nor myth, but something between: simultaneously personal record and symbolic proposition — an investigation into whether the inner life has a shape, and what happens when you try to make it visible.

I live and work in Maine. I studied literature and creative writing at Colby College and later studied architecture at Yale University. - A.O.