Spend Some Time in My World

"Jan in Berlin, Germany 2009" - POP print from a Wet Collodion Negative.My approach to making photographs has been grounded in three ideas or concepts. I call this my philosophical tripod. They are; identity, difference, and memory.

If you were to scour through the thousands of plates I’ve made over the many years of doing this, you would find these ideas supporting almost every image.

I’m most interested in the tension that comes from someone seeing themselves very differently than the world sees them. When we are photographed, we exude that tension. Especially the way I photograph people; I want that to be palpable. We all have it, some more than others. My friend, Caron, sent me this article the other day that sums this idea up nicely. 

When I receive an email or someone comments and they say something like this, "There’s something about your portraits that’s haunting and disturbing". I translate it like this, "Your portraits make me feel a little bit uneasy, but I’m attracted to them. It must be the tension the sitter is feeling being revealed in this way."

We live so much of our lives in the past. Our memories, good, bad, or indifferent, drive a lot of what we do and who we are. Some would argue that if you live in the past, you live in depression. Maybe that’s true for some people, and I can see this point of view. I use memory as a learning tool. While I don’t "live in the past", I often think about it and evaluate current events based on it, at least to some extent. The aesthetic of wet collodion screams memory. To my mind, there's no better visual description for memory than a wet collodion image. People recognize this, even if they don't know about the process. It's visceral and visual. 

Many years ago, I heard someone say, "How can every person have the desire to be unique yet at the same time want so desperately to fit in?" That has been in my mind for decades. It is the quote of difference that appears in every one of my images/portraits. This is the question I’m asking and the struggle of every sitter trying to answer. I can see it in the image. I can feel it when I’m making the image, too.

I’ve been fortunate to have people that will actually spend time with my work, read my statements and understand it. There are few feelings or emotions that are more satisfying than to have someone email me saying that they "get it", that the work resonates with them and they’ve connected the dots. What more can someone ask for? We spend so much of our lives in other people’s worlds; your employer’s, a television show, a movie, a book – so it’s an honor when someone spends time in my world.