May 10 – June 5, 1985
For over five decades, I have used photographs to interrogate the arbitrary life choices we make. Once we are fed and sheltered, what else do we attend to? The portraits reveal eccentricities in the ordinary and normalcy in the unconventional. An ambition of these images is to hold a mirror up to viewers and their culture. They also reflect the artist, whose practice is to encourage strangers to open up about their pursuits and reveal their goals. A byproduct of this effort is insight into my own passion—for engaging others, for initiating conversations, and for capturing images—in the quest for a revealing portrait that also stands as a cultural metaphor.
Photography’s power stems from a near-universal assumption that it records reality. These photographs are purposefully made to appear unambiguous, in a style that could be described as documentary, to take advantage of that impression of veracity. Visual elements such as pose and environment are not controlled or created, so much as identified and chosen. Facts hover. A haiku-like title appears with each image to answer the first questions a viewer might ask, but serves to point toward other questions. Alfred North Whitehead said, “We think in generalities, but we live in detail.”
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