Private Room

Pamela Hanson's Private Room gathers portraits of eight women photographed over two years at Lafayette House, a small hotel in downtown New York, framing undress and repose as a matter of interior life rather than performance.

Working with stylist Susan Winget inside the hotel's rooms, Hanson built a sequence of sixty color photographs across the book's ninety-six pages, treating each woman's session as its own closed world: tousled bedding, half-drawn curtains, the ordinary furniture of a rented room standing in for privacy itself. Damiani published the book as a suede-bound hardcover with an accompanying text by the artist Jack Pierson, extending the language of fashion portraiture into something closer to a diary.

Hanson has shot editorial for Vogue, Marie Claire and GQ over a three-decade career, with prints held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent collection. Private Room stands apart from that commercial output as a personal, self-directed project, continuing an interest in female intimacy she had explored in earlier books.