Family Tree
November 6 – 30, 2008
I began tearing up portraits during the seventies when I was in College. These were reassembled, then re-photographed on an ancient, unused, copy camera that I taught myself to use. I cut the eyeballs out of my girlfriend’s portrait and pounded nails into the face of my photo instructor. I was naïve and knew nothing about the collage work of John Heartfield or Jess.
In the mid-eighties I was offered a solo show at Force Nordstrom Gallery in San Francisco. I began shooting portraits in earnest, printing them, tearing and rearranging them into new figures before gluing them down with rubber cement. I began calling myself a photosurgeon and titled this exhibition: Beauties and Beasts. In hindsight, most of the images were crude and embarrassingly sloppy, although it managed to get a review in Artforum. One photograph from this series was a composite image of my six-year old self, married to a present day portrait. This became my first AgeMap photograph and prompted me to make further images in the early 1990’s.
The AgeMap series of photographs chronicles the passage of time by juxtaposing and merging portraits of the same individual as a child and an adult. These montage portraits telescope the slow process of aging into a single picture. The point at which the images are physically torn together becomes both the boundary line and bridge between decades of passing time. This composite photograph could be viewed as an eerie life-map, staring towards the future.
The AgeMap photograph also suggests that much of our nature or who we are is established at a very early age, and that these character traits remain unwavering throughout our lives. This conclusion is backed up by the studies of many behavioral scientists.
These images were shown at San Francisco Artspace and later at Germans Van Eyck in New York City. Later I took a portfolio of this series to the Museum of Modern Art for review, a service no longer offered to photographers. Susan Kismaric a curator at the museum later told an editor at LIFE magazine about my work, when they were doing a feature story on Aging. After reviewing my work, LIFE commissioned me to create an AgeMap photograph for the October, 1992 issue. Things happened very quickly. I made the photograph in eight hours and overnighted it to NewYork from San Francisco. The next day I received a phone call from an assistant editor letting me know how much they appreciated the image and told me that it would be a cover unless a war broke out or the president was assonated.
A couple of days later the same assistant called to tell me that the image was in the art department and that they were adding color to half of the image and taking the tear out. I was floored and asked for a proof to be sent me the next day, as these were the days before images flew through the internet. But the proof never came. My phone call to LIFE, later that day, went to voicemail. Finally, the following day, the proof arrived and to put it simply: “it was no longer my work”. The tear showing the jump of time was missing and the coloring was cartoonish. I was furious when I called LIFE and asked to speak to Chief Editor David Friend. He never took the time to return my call and by the end of the phone call I learned that the magazine was at the printers. I’d been hoodwinked. It was obvious why they had fucked with my artwork. The headline said: “Can We Stop Aging”. I was photographing ‘what aging looks like’ and they were trying to turn back the hands of time. We were moving in opposite directions and my artwork stood directly in their crosshairs.
That afternoon I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of Vodka and began a furious letter to David Friend. At the bottom I taped a .38 hollowpoint, saying that it was a gift and he could do whatever he wanted with the shell. My roommate Joy found me at the kitchen table, wasted, with pen in hand. She asked what was going on and proceeded to read my letter, which she immediately took possession of. Joy was concerned that the Mail Police (pre- 911, pre-homeland security) would arrive, busting down our door. She promised to return the letter the following day, once I was sober.
Months later I was told that David Friend was afraid that I was going to get an injunction to stop the press – something that I was way too naïve to have accomplished. I was also told that the altering of my image, created an uproar between photography traditionalists and others in the art department. Even so, I never received an apology but did receive a decent cover fee and much more money from the reselling of the image multiple times.
I later returned to this series in 2002 to make new color photographs, as my generation was one of the last to have their school portraits made in black and white.
My next series of photographs using the photosurgery technique was titled Couples.
I first noticed couples that looked alike in the Goldwing Motorcycle community. The Honda Goldwing is the bike for couples that dress and groom alike. I wondered how these couples made the decision to do this? Was it an attempt to become a mirror of one’s partner? Or did the couples gradually adopt the manners and grooming of their partner? Or were they simply people that were attracted to partners that visually resembled themselves?
I found couples to photograph from my community of friends and artists and was assisted by my friend Tornado, a charismatic mover, in my community. The most important part in making the principal photographs is making sure the poses closely match. I suggested a pose or gesture and the two partners would try to mimic me, and each other. These singular photographs are sized together in the darkroom and later torn and glued onto a matt board.
Much of what makes the composite image work is done in our brain. It fills in or smudges out some of the obvious differences in couple’s physical appearance once they have been collaged together into one portrait. The brain tricks us into seeing a masculine / feminine image as one multi-sexual being.
Like my curiosity about some couples looking alike, I was also interested in how immediate family members look alike and much later began photographing families.
Extended families endlessly discuss whether a new baby resembles his or her mother or father, because physical resemblance is the most striking and primary evidence of a genetic connection. The FamilyTree portrait visually maps the hereditary characteristics we inherit from our parents and demonstrates how some aspects of our futures were codified at the moment of conception. This composite photograph can be viewed as an eerie life-map and is sometimes mistaken as a montage of the same person at different ages.
It is human nature to ask who am I? And beyond that, where did I come from? By asking these questions, we try to both understand our connection to this world and ground our identities in long history of our families and forebears.
The FamilyTree Project was produced with the help of a Peterborough Project Grant from the MacDowell Colony in 2007.
