Dorr first began exploring the Florida Keys in the early 1920s in a boat she built herself. Later in the decade, she brought hired models along to create images like this one. Dorr posed this young woman to personify the “caprice” of the title while also playing her body’s texture and shape off those of the coastal tree.

When she made this image, Dorr had only been photographing seriously for three years. She had taken the medium up as a career after her husband had lost the family fortune (she divorced him in 1931). Based in Miami at the time, she photographed wealthy patrons and seasonal tourists in her studio, but on the side she explored personal projects that were more metaphorical and romantic. Dorr would continue to create intimate and nostalgic images for the rest of her career, unmoved by photographic styles that looked at the world in starker terms.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)