To make Red Swimmer and other works in this series, Boo Ritson applied brightly colored house paint directly on the faces and bodies of her sitters, transforming them into characters loosely based on American stereotypes. She then asked photographer Andy Crawford to capture these painting-sculpture-performance hybrids before the paint dried. As Ritson explains, “I'm not a photographer; I'm an artist who uses photography. In its raw state, my work can only be seen by me and the people I work with, so photography is essential. I can't show my work without it.”