Carefully composed and lit to augment textural details, DeFeo's photographs (all untitled) demonstrate the artist's interest in the conflation and mutation of organic and mechanical materials. Several are set-up still lifes fraught with psychological urgency and personal meaning. Three photographs from 1973 feature her dog's tattered and grimy leg cast strung up on a wall like a folk-art retablo. With their sharp focus and moody lighting, the works have the haunting appeal of the photographs of decaying carcasses by Frederick Sommer or the wrapped assemblages of her friend Bruce Conner.

A print from 1971 is a crisp close-up of DeFeo's dental bridge lying on a cotton tablecloth with a typed label underneath the image reading "my model. . .out of my own head!" (The bridge is the subject of her "Crescent Bridge" paintings of the following year.) Another work from 1973 features six of her extracted teeth piled in a large clam shell. In this plainspoken memento mori, the armor is off, all defenses are down.