PHOTOGRAPHING PEOPLE

I would not say that I was isolated as a child, but our family did not socialize much, which may have fostered my timidity and kept me at a distance from others.  Now, when looking at the manniquin photographs that I made in the mid-sixties, I believe I was practicing on them until I was comfortable enough to photograph “real” people.

Later I found photographing individuals was an enjoyable way to get to know them. Two things stand out in my mind about this: first is the collaboration of making something with another person, and second,  is the exchange of ideas that happened during a three- hour session. This collaboration was easiest with artists because they had a comfort level with the slow, cumulative process of art-making, made even slower by my use of a large format camera.  These sessions ended up being a  sharing experience for both of us, talking about the ideas, the changes needed for the next photograph, or finding an unintended aspect (perhaps an “accident”) that might enhance the idea, or even lead us in another direction.  

In one series, “Singing the Dark,”  I was most attracted to the images that barely revealed the face.  With this in mind, as I began the group of work on close-up faces (1993-2003), the only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted the face to be partially hidden, so I used milky looking, translucent masks which allowed aspects of the person’s face to merge with the mask, almost as if the face was partially emerging from a cloud. Eventually, when I tired of the masks (displaced nostrils were often a problem), I began to create “masks” by manipulating light and shadow across the person’s face while making the exposure, and consequently a much more extensive series of faces evolved.  At the beginning of a session, I made a realistic photograph of the person, and then we set to work making photographs which were anything but realistic.  Usually about halfway through the session, the artists would realize the photographs we were making were not about them personally and thus would visibly relax, giving themselves over to our mutual effort.  Of course, this was often when the most interesting images were made.  On an entirely different level, perhaps it was the collaborative effort that nurtured a deeper artistic and personal connection with these artists because many times, as they were leaving, people offered to return if I ever needed them.   I was honored by their offer that suggested a mutual recognition of our art-making. 

Many of the individuals who generously posed for me in this close-up series are not readily identifiable because their features may be obscured in shadow or by flashes of light, and the title uses only the person’s initials.  It was later that I realized that because I had been photographing almost exclusively people who were part of the visual arts community, and because I made the realistic photograph of each person at the beginning of a session, I had also assembled an informal visual archive of many of the  artists working in the Philadelphia area during this period.