TRANSPARENCIES

Shot with a micro lens at very close range, these portraits of ordinary people reflect an intimacy and immediacy between photographer and subject that goes below the subject's self image. Because the lens is so close to the subject's face, the image gets below the personae and reveals the face beneath the personal myth.

The photographs are then transferred on to transparency paper and placed in sculptural frames constructed of found objects. The subjects in these photographic sculptures appear silent and suspended in a moment of still space. They have the potential to surprise the viewer into a moment of pure presence, in which the mind may be momentarily freed from thought.

The intent of the work is not symbolic or representational: The works are simply photographic portraits in environments that will best display them.  They are not about containment or limitation, but about images in space. Everything about the pieces works towards allowing things to be in a moment in time. The photos are, for the most part, not cropped to fit into the various shapes of the found objects. They never stop being photographs.  The use of visible clips to hang the pictures suggests the practice of clothes-pinning wet prints on a line in the darkroom.

The use of overlapping images, resulting in seeing one image through the lens of another; the use of repeated images and the ability to walk around the images¾thereby changing them¾initiates a confrontation with identity which keeps bouncing the viewer back to an immediate experience of pure presence.