Rohan Mahoney
Rohan Mahoney (b. 2000) is an American photographer and designer working across photography, publication design, and staging. His recent work explores atmosphere, performance, and the construction of identity through portraiture, observational image-making, and sequencing.
Pieces Like A Lizard
Pieces Like A Lizard is a series of staged photographic portraits made with friends and non-models in unfamiliar locations. Through props, gestures and loosely directed performances, the work explores photography as a space for projection, fantasy and self-construction. The images focus on moments where performance and sincerity begin to collapse into one another, using the camera as both a theatrical device and a reflective surface. Emerging through collaboration between photographer and subject, the photographs examine the tension between constructed image-making and the spontaneous ways people inhabit objects, gestures and performances.
Threshold
Threshold is a photographic publication centred on backstage spaces, green rooms, and transitional interiors across music venues in Scotland. Rather than documenting performers directly, the work focuses on the spaces where performance is constructed: mirrors, curtains, empty chairs, dressing tables, and half-lit rooms suspended between public spectacle and private ritual.
Developed in response to the ideas explored in my first semester essay The Third Gaze, the project examines performance as something psychological as much as theatrical. These spaces become stages in themselves — places where identity is rehearsed, adjusted, and negotiated before entering public view. Through quiet, cinematic images devoid of performers, Threshold explores the tension between authenticity and self-construction, asking where the individual ends and the performer begins.
