Christine Lee Smith’s photographic series, "Rose Portraits," features 12 thought-provoking portraits of women, bare faced and shouldered, against an ultra feminine rose wallpaper background. Sitters self-selected participation from a broadly distributed invitation to Smith’s social networks for women around their 30s. The images push the viewers’ conception of gender, embodiment, and identity as they are stripped of social norms of feminine identity while completely surrounded in a typically understood feminine background. The series becomes particularly poignant when considering who is missing from this collection. Additionally, the series challenges viewers' social training in consumptive gazing, as each subject gazes directly back at the viewer in a gentle confrontation, asking: "Do you see me?" Holding the threads of identity, race, reproduction, and consumptive gazing this work offers the viewer the same complications that face a large portion of Western women each day.