Joan Haseltine is a visual artist whose work revolves around complex ideas of perception and the exploration of emotional intelligence from a female perspective.
Through psychological landscapes and portraits, she examines the layered realities women experience throughout their lives, addressing themes such as gender-based violence, cultural expectations, emotional labor, and the constant pressure to balance multiple roles simultaneously.
At the same time, her work is equally concerned with resilience, endurance, and the quiet strength that often defines the female experience. She is interested in the emotional spaces that exist beneath the visible surface, where vulnerability and resistance coexist.
Her project, Bluest Bruise, explores a world shaped by subtle and often invisible forms of violence. Rather than focusing solely on overt acts, the work reflects on the accumulation of smaller emotional wounds that gradually shape our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. This body of work emerged from a process of existential self-reflection, rooted in thoughts about mortality, impermanence, and the inevitability of death. These are universal realities shared by all living beings, yet it is the individual path toward death that ultimately defines and differentiates us. Bruises themselves become a metaphor within the work: they appear, darken, fade, and disappear over time, carrying traces of pain while also suggesting healing and transformation.
Photography has become a way for Haseltine to navigate these ideas. Her camera acts as a companion as she wanders through unfamiliar paths and shifting landscapes, searching for moments that hold both emotional and symbolic resonance. She moves through fields, forests, skies, and open spaces observing clouds, grasses, insects, trees, and changing light. Within nature, she looks for magic, mystery, and disorder simultaneously. She is drawn to moments that reveal both beauty and instability, where the world feels immense and fragile at the same time.
Through these panoramic encounters with the natural world, Haseltine tries to create images that remind us of how small we are within the vastness of existence. At the same time, she hopes these photographs can offer a sense of wonder and emotional possibility within an increasingly troubled world. She is interested in moments of transcendence, however temporary they may be, and in the ways visual experience can soften our awareness of life’s finitude. Photography allows her to negotiate an uneasy but necessary relationship with the world around her, one built on both discomfort and fascination.
Bluest Bruise also exists as a handmade artist book, created in collaboration with the bookbinder For the Birds Trapped in Airports. The book is part of the collections of LACMA and the University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Department. The physical form of the book was important to the project, allowing the images and sequencing to function as an intimate and tactile experience rather than simply a collection of photographs.
Haseltine’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including exhibitions at the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles, the PH Gallery in Budapest, and the Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel, California. In 2021, her work was selected for Critical Mass Top 200 and she was recognized as one of the Best Modern Photographers of 2021 by All About Photo. Her projects have also been featured in publications including L’Oeil de la Photographie, Lenscratch, and Don’t Take Pictures Magazine.
She holds an MFA in Photography from Maine Media College, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. [Official Website]
