Physical Portraits - December 2021

I got my first camera when I was nine. I wish it was a cool film camera but in reality it was an Ipod touch. Since then I have grown a collection of about 40,000 photos on my phone. Collectively they tell the story of my life. As it goes, my phone does not have the storage space for my life story so every couple months I go on a huge photo cleanse, deleting as many as I can. What I have always found is that I can never bring myself to delete images of certain people. It is a superstitious thing. I have this irrational belief that if I delete an image of someone, mostly family members, then they are at risk of dying. This unfounded anxiety compulsion has resulted in a camera roll filled with horrible, blurry, spam photos of family members. I’m not sure when I began to tie the act of deleting an image of someone to the literal deletion of a person. 

In this project I explored the themes of loss and physical representation as I took images of the most familiar and important people in my life, my family. The photos are all printed on handmade paper that is delicate and non-archival. 

In these prints the human element is shown in their imperfections. Each print was heavily worked with. The process went from blending paper together, to drying it, painting the cyanotype chemicals on it, drying it, exposing it to UV light, drying it, and then mounting them. They are worn and imperfect. Lumpy and discolored. Disintegrated and fuzzy. Just as imperfectly perfect as the sitters

I come from a family made up of craftsmen and artists. The two most important being my mother, a potter, and my father, a woodworker. Because of them, I have absorbed a strong value for working with my hands and seeing the human touch. 

The paper was made by blending a mixture of watercolor paper, fabric from my childhood home, acrylic paint, some of my hair and a piece of writing done by each member of my family. I included fabric from my physical home to incorporate textures and elements of touch. I added my hair, a part of my body, to symbolize the biological bond that all the people pictured share. Each piece of writing that was shredded into the paper was kept private. After I took the photos of each person I gave them a piece of paper to write whatever they wanted. They each knew that it would never be read. Blending these handwritten notes into the paper represents each of their individual voices. 

A reason I love large format photography is the intentionality that comes with it. While directing each sitter I placed them in positions that I felt captured their presence and my personal relationship to them. Each image is quite ghostly, like an afterimage. It reminds me of the moment after you stare at a light for a while and then look away. Just as I now look back at the first photos on my Ipod touch, I look forward to seeing how time alters these prints both physically and emotionally.