Over the years of working together, photographer TheHarryRifkin and his subject, longtime partner and model Alina, have built a shared language, one rooted in trust, curiosity, and the willingness to explore what lies beneath the surface. In their work together, that language has become a way to investigate identity, performance, and the shifting space between the self we inhabit and the self we imagine. This project continues that journey, inviting the viewer into a layered visual conversation where light, color, reflection, and emotion are as integral as the figure itself.

By: TheHarryRifkin, Photographer

Like so many of my collaborations with Alina, this one began in the territory of identity and character. We returned to familiar questions: Who do we become when we are seen? Who are we when we look inward? What lives between the self we inhabit and the self we imagine? From the start, it was clear this had to be performance-driven to introduce the viewer to these concepts.

We had the shared understanding that the dynamic between what is seen and what is reflected needed depth—not just depth of image, but depth of meaning and emotion within both the larger frame and the frame within the crop. The mirror brings us to a deeper place of vulnerability, and with that, the trust increases to capture the very nature of the concept.

What fascinates me most in image creation is the quiet emergence of the character, the way mystery lingers just beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed. When that moment arrives, something raw, poetic, and unexplained flickers through the frame. This is what makes collaborating with Alina such a beautiful experience. She can layer all of these elements into the performance and transform the image in unexpected ways. She can move you with the simplest expression and gaze. When this happens, the image stops being about what is shown and becomes about what is felt.

The elements of color and light will always be another presence and story within the image-making process. Here, it is no different. Each of these additional characters lends its visual voice to move and elevate the image. Without that distinct language, the image-making is cheated of an invaluable contribution, performance, and elevation of the narrative.

The depth and meaning Alina and I have been able to extract through our collaboration are impossible without trust. Over years of working together, that trust has become the invisible architecture of our process. It allows for risk, for vulnerability, for the kind of surrender that makes real transformation possible. In this space, creation is not a transaction but a conversation, one that continues long after the shutter closes. The making and the image live together, each carrying the echo of the other, each reminding me why I return to this work again and again.

TheHarryRifkin is the nom de plume of Los Angeles-based artist/photographer Brad Hochberg. In his/our imagined reality, Rifkin is a septuagenarian photographer from Los Angeles, whose decades-long journey unfolds as a dreamscape of memory, emotion, and transformation. For the past seven years, he and actress Alina Lee have shared a creative communion, part muse, part mirror, exploring identity’s shifting edges. Their characters are never fixed; they shimmer between self and other, presence and possibility, blurring the line between self and other, guided by presence, emotion, and symbolic depth. Together, they’ve forged a visual language both intimate and expansive—an alchemy of trust, vulnerability, and creative becoming.

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