“Rapture, from the Somewhere Tropical” series by Gina Osterloh (2006)

Gina Osterloh (b. 1973)
Rapture, from the Somewhere Tropical series, 2006
LightJet photograph
36 x 40 in.
Private collection

Everyone says, ‘You must be an army baby.’ My mom actually emigrated from Cebu, Philippines, to Guatemala first … She had already gotten her graduate degree in the Philippines, but it didn’t count in the States at the time.—Gina Osterloh

Gina Osterloh is the daughter of a German American father and a mother from the Philippines who met in graduate school. Somewhere Tropical, a series of staged photographs rendering “unreadable” the figure of the artist, negotiates the relationship between 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional space and references concealed identities and notions of “passing,” clichéd tourist images of the tropics, war, war films, and her mother’s family history during WWII.