Theater of Love was a 2018 photographic performance work created by artist Amanda Shank in response to Ronald de Sousa’s 1992 essay “Love as Theater.”

It has since expanded into an ongoing creative exploration at the intersection of autobiography and erotic philosophy. Works contain elements of performance, collage, autofiction and portraiture and are currently focused on artist books as a form of temporal literary theater.
INDEX OF SELF-STUDY
Since 2005
2025: “The crucial vitality of my camera. A feeling too, unlanguaged, unlanguageable: photograph all of it, self-study all of it. Now. This. Exactly this.”

Index of Self-Study is a durational photographic performance work initiated in 2005. Combining elements of autobiography, eroticism, documentation and poetic license, it is an ongoing effort to archive a subjective experience of the female body.

Each individual self-study is created spontaneously, then indexed chronologically, with the full archive in a constant state of flux, revision, and refinement.

Begun: January 2005
Latest update: July 2025
Full project archive: indexofself.study