Rachel Tine’s career has been as study in resilience. A lifelong artist, she picked up photography at the age of 14 and landed her first professional shoot just two years later, regularly working for local bands. However, this promising early career was cut short by a fire that ravaged her work and destroyed her camera. Devastated and demoralized, it would take eight years for Tine to gain the confidence to pick up where she had left off. But once a camera fell back into her hands, Tine hit the ground running, building up a successful commercial practice alongside her fine art photography.
In the process, Tine realized she could use her platform and artistry to empower others, bringing their own resilience to light. Invisible Fractures, a series Tine began shooting in 2016, tells the stories of people who have suffered emotional abuse. The portraits show her subjects wrenchingly confined, objectified, and silenced—making the invisible scars of their experience palpably conspicuous. In accompanying interviews, these survivors detail what it was like to be routinely demeaned, manipulated, and hurt in their own voices; ensuring that viewers leave with the understanding that emotional abuse can be just as damaging as its physical counterpart.
Tine writes, “I wanted to raise awareness about how each of us can support survivors and help end abuse, and to do justice to the complicated emotions of each survivor whose pictures I took,” continuing, “together, we can speak the unspeakable and help each other see the invisible.” Selections from the series will be on view in Beacon Gallery’s Mixed Messages exhibition, running from July 17th to August 30th.
This focus on giving voice to marginalized communities has followed Tine through to her work today. Much of her time is currently devoted to receiving her master’s degree in social work with a specialization in trauma. She also continues multiple portrait series that address homelessness, addiction, racism, and womxn empowerment. Outside of this work, her photography has been featured in publications internationally and exhibited to wide acclaim in and around the Boston area. When she has energy to spare, Tine works on perfecting recipes for a future cookbook that strives to make healthy cooking more accessible. You can keep up with her work on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, or on her website http://www.racheltinephotography.com/.
Leave a Reply