Jenny Gage’s photographs are like a fashion shoot gone terribly wrong (or terribly right, depending on your opinion of fashion shoots); one can discern nods toward the hyper-produced filmset photography of Gregory Crewdson (with whom she studied at Yale’s MFA program), the lewd, veneered, rec room underworlds of Larry Clark, the menaced feminist iconography of Cindy Sherman, everything laced together with suggestions of a flashier, cretin-free Diane Arbus (Gage’s subjects have all their DNA). A Gage photograph in which a woman kneels naked amongst the rushes reveals an alarming and unattributed protuberance—a breast? A third arm? A tumor? Lord knows—rolling out from beneath her armpit. Beauty turned grotesque and then back into a weary beauty—this is the gorgeously debased yet compelling Gage terrain. Looking at her work, an uncomfortable emotional and physical reckoning can occur. Repugnance, of course, is fascinating, and so are beautiful people looking ugly. This is not a petty schadenfreude, however, but a shifty poking at our own perpetual insecurities about façade-making.

Gage produces photographic series, usually “set” in a single geographic location (Ventura, California; Dolores, Colorado), and starring a “young girl” whom Gage has found (or stalked, by her own admission) in the town. These series are not meant to be factual documents of her subject’s life, nor are they entirely make-believe, but joint role-playing ventures that blend autobiography and fantasy—the fantasy of the subject, and the fantasy of the “watcher.” Gage’s oblique narratives are suggestive of sinister events about to transpire, or sinister events that have recently occurred, with the extent of the damage yet to be determined. The mood is always kinetically tense if subdued (the calm before or after the storm), and the tragedy feels fated—like participants in a Richard Yates novel, or a Greek myth, these “characters” are doomed to carry out the proclamations of some dark oracle. As is the case with many bleakly-inclined artists, Jenny Gage, in person, is a righteous hoot. She grew up in Malibu, California, but now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she and her husband Tom Betterton (both in their mid-thirties) collaborate on everything from her photographs to films to commercial photography work. We talked in their garden on one of those two sunny days this past spring in drizzly New York.

—Heidi Julavits

I. BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN UGLY STATES, OR BACK BRACES

THE BELIEVER: You always have such amazing underpants in your photographs.

JENNY GAGE: I’m really into underwear.

BLVR: But it’s not underwear—it’s underpants. You know, saggy bottoms, cotton, little prints.

JG: They’re all either my mom’s or my grandmother’s and I’m always telling the girls, “They’ve been washed!” But I have yet to use a photograph—a photo that I’ve made...