A hyphen can be a dangerous thing. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a debate on the hyphen was a great part of American politics. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were decidedly against the hyphen that let people identify as European-American, or Italian-American, Irish-American, pretty much anything-American. “Hyphenated Americans” soon became a derogatory term, meant to imply a diminished allegiance to their American identity.

Much more recently, and with the identity politics of the hyphen far from being resolved, the hyphen debate moved into the field of vocations and avocations, with “hyphenates” or “multihyphenates” meaning mostly those who were professionally active in many areas: the writer-director, the singer-songwriter and so on. To be sure, some hint of accusation remains. Multihyphenates are often seen as trying to be too many things at once. For that, they are accused of not only doing justice to none, but also of undermining the established content of any one of their hyphenated activities.

Efi Gousi is by all means a multihyphenate. The young Greek actress-director-photographer has in fact found great success in each part of her hyphenated professional self. And while each of her occupations traditionally deals with what the hyphen implies, which is to say breaking apart and reconstructing a person’s motives, emotions and reactions, the amazing talent she has for this process shines brightest through her photography. Her images pit the passionate against the inanimate, the spirited against the broken, and the innocent against the thoroughly sinister. The result is a battle which is documented in the stylized pictures of its own remnants, imagined as a coherent whole.