“How can we read a person if their face is hidden?” asks Chicago fine-art portrait photographer Oksana Kami. “We hide our faces to protect ourselves. The more I meet people, the more I can’t believe my eyes and ears—how much pain those people carry inside!”

Kami created this portrait as a reminder that “if you wear a mask for a long time, you become one, and when you hide your true self from the world, you hide it from yourself first and foremost,” she says. “The main point here is that you don’t have to look for a shadow to hide your true face—you can allow yourself to have different faces, different emotions and different tones in the whole spectrum of your inner reality.”

(Shot on a Canon 5D Mark III and 50mm f/1.2 lens with a Flashpoint XPLOR 600 PRO TTL monolight.)

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