In the audio slideshow above, photographer Zoe Crosher talks about the wall installation from her ongoing series The Michelle duBois Project, currently on view in MoMA’s New Photography 2012 exhibition.

I first met the Los Angeles–based artist about a year ago, when she was on a residency and had a studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. I had heard she was an artist to look out for, but wasn’t familiar with her work. When I walked into her studio, I saw hundreds of pictures of the same woman—sometimes elaborately dressed up as different characters, other times posing as herself for a casual snapshot. In every picture she looks like a different woman, but she is always aware of and posing for the camera. The woman looked a bit like the artist, but I couldn’t be quite sure. These pictures danced between fact and fiction in an intriguing and disquieting way. Who was she? Where was she? Where these faked pictures?

Zoe Crosher. B&W Back of Neck from The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois. 2008. Gelatin silver print, 20 1/2 x 29 3/4″ (52.1 x 75.6 cm). Courtesy the artist and Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles

It turns out that Crosher inherited the large archive of Michele duBois, an alias of an all-American girl from Oklahoma who was a flight attendant and occasional call girl in the Pacific Rim during the 1970s and 1980s. Crosher re-photographed, scanned, enlarged, altered, and re-edited duBois’s self-portraits to create complicated and alternate narratives. The result is an ever-changing accumulation of pictures of an utterly fascinating woman who questions the possibilities of self-portraiture and representation.