When I was a child I used to sit for hours people watching, imagining their life stories, their memories and what they had for breakfast. I was fascinated by their body language and what it meant. I wondered how significant places and memories reflected in their posture, in their presence. I was enthralled by that moment when I thought, “ah ha, there you are” and I would feel like I had witnessed something that was more human, more unique than the social construction or role that was being played out before me. As I grew older my fascination continued further, crossing the barrier of people watcher into the realm of interaction. I spoke to people to try to understand what kind of person they really were beyond my observations of them. I am still intrigued with the notion of forming a portrait of a person combining memory, space, and gesture. I am inspired by the history of quilting and story telling and how these traditional practices can be used through alternative photography processes to create images existing in a modern world that seems void of these fundamentally human traces.
Over the last year I have begun to truly analyze my many relationships and attempt to understand them within these terms. While being aware of my perceptions, exemplified by R.D. Laing in his Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, I have been attempting to create a portrait of a person based on my interpretations of them and a significant memory they shared with me. The images are patched together much like their stories and my memories of them.
The portrait includes gestures, feet, face, and space. The space represents the physical area where their memory occurred, either fictitious (based on my own imaginings of the place) or actual. The gesture and face are taken at separate times without giving the subject any instruction or direction. I simply wait for that moment of “ah ha” to return and the image is taken. Using traditional photographic techniques I patch together their portrait to reconcile my perceptions of the person. Like the fluidity and inconsistency of memory I layer and wash away chemicals to reveal visceral spaces coinciding with the subjects traditional portrait.