Her husband died a long time ago. Twenty years already, nearly a lifetime by now, but also, it seems, right around the corner, just one street back. For so long, and even sometimes still, she has lived parallel lives — the one robbed from her when he died, and the one which circumstances were forcing her to create. But how do you let go of a life of love and companionship and the sense of self, all that came of it.?

She awoke each day, conflicted. She wanted her husband to have lived. She wanted what she had loved. She wanted to get better, feel better, move forward. And she wanted the same for her sons. Yet sometimes, when she tried to move forward, it felt like she was having an affair on her husband, her family. She was not, she reasoned, because he was dead. But still.

At the time, she was working in human resources for Apple, doing a lot of work around changing organizations and the lives that went with them, when she read a personal book by someone with a parallel story to hers. The thesis explored how to embrace that liminal time when your world has changed dramatically, when your identity, your sense of self has become altered. The question and the answer, she found, lay in leveraging the experience as a way to grow en route to the other side of the story.

“Finally, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to embrace this period and come out stronger.’ And so I did,” she said, “trying on all these different personas, some real, some imagined, while learning how to bring my previous person and life along with me to live a parallel life with who I was becoming.”

One of her first steps forward lay in landing a red purse at a school fundraising auction. She loved that designer bag, less for what it was or how it looked, and more for what it meant. It was feminine, fashionable, extravagant — representing all the conventional elements of the feminine mystique. She had to have it, still less for what it was and more for the permission it gave her to lift into a different persona than the one weighing her down.

Jacque Rupp bought the bag.

The red purse became a prop for the photographer who has spent her life using imagery to both portray and interpret her story. And the evocative, provocative, devastating, seductive, sad photographs, largely of herself, paired with her prose, create a tale we can neither turn from nor stop reading. Particularly, the parts where we find something of ourselves there.

The result is “The Red Purse: A story of grief and desire.” Published in winter 2023 by Daylight Community Arts Foundation, and presented in hardcover, surfaced in red silk, the artisanal book is available at Ami Carmel and at the Center for Photographic Art (CFA), both in Carmel.

“I remember the first time the red purse made an appearance in a photograph,” wrote CFA Executive Director Ann Jastrab, in an Afterword for the book. “It seemed tame compared to the lace undergarment worn by the woman carrying it … She was beautiful, she was reckless, she was lost, she was aging. She was unstoppable, too, because there’s power in pain, even when we don’t know it.”

Rupp also understood she had found the portal that would both inspire and enable her to reimagine her life, to pair her abilities to create a kind of “film noir in book form.”

“I also knew, in the story I was developing through photography, and the words paired with it, that it had to be real, it had to be my story. I found myself comfortable seeing the beauty, the gift inherent in death, and embracing that. I grieved my loss, yet I also found myself forced into situations where I became comfortable enough with the subject that I was allowed to do widowhood in a different way.”

Coming of age in a dark room

Rupp has framed her life through photography since she was a high school student in Woodstock, New York, sequestered in the dark room. At 16, and emerging from a tough childhood, she found the space a special place to be.

“Photography has always been important to me, therapeutic even; I’ve always tapped into it,” she said, “when having a rough time.”

A fan of both color and black-and-white photography, Rupp was working in black and white when using film, yet upon entering the digital era, she switched to color, which she finds both more difficult and less forgiving.

“Still,” she said, “I like both. Sometimes, when I love an image but it’s not working in color, I switch to black and white, and it works.”

Before the pandemic, Rupp was traveling the world, taking workshops and photographing the people she encountered, having learned early that photography can be a wonderful way to kindle relationships.

Once COVID curtailed travel and Rupp was sheltering in place, she turned her attention and her camera to her personal project. Today, she divides her life between Los Altos and Carmel.

“I went from being a caged animal and then, all of a sudden, my energy and inspiration started flowing and I was released. The pandemic was a time for introspection for all of us, a calmness with it. I never would have done this if I had not been on my own, stuck inside a house.”

In addition to Rupp’s perspective, “The Red Purse” presents an Afterword by American photographer Jason Langer, known for his mysterious and noir portrayals of moments in urban life.

“The Red Purse,” he wrote, “is about what happens next. Through a series of photographic tableaux, photographer Jacque Rupp poses a series of  ‘what if’ questions about the choices she made or could have made after the passing of her husband. These are not pictures about grief. The Red Purse is about renewal, perseverance, and harnessing the power of desire to carve a new path after the loss of a life partner. It is about giving permission to rediscover oneself, try on different personae, and beginning anew.”

Additional perspective is presented through a conversation between Rupp and Elinor Carucci, an Israeli-American photographer, living in New York City, widely recognized for her intimate photographic portrayals of her family and others of renown.

“Elinor was my mentor for the past years,” Rupp said. “An established photographer with the New York Times, she photographed Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars. At the end of my book, I shared our conversation as a way to weave her into the story.”

Rupp sees herself not as a writer but as a visual storyteller, who uses the camera to clarify and express what she thinks, feels, and sees. In this case, she is focused on loss and rebuilding, creating new identities, new possibilities, particularly in the face of ageism.

“Older women, divorcees, widowed women—we need to have more conversation about who we have been and who we are becoming,” she said. “We all do it differently, and that’s fine, as long as we still see ourselves. I want my photography and my work to have impact, to make a difference. It’s about social impacts and personal sense of self.”