Every God

Since the summer of 2014, I’ve committed to a decade of photographing visitors inside the Pantheon (PAN: Every; THEO: God) in Rome, Italy on and around the Summer Solstice.

I have since made an annual photographic pilgrimage to this open place of worship and ancient sundial, which invites an international audience. The gestures and self-presentations of distant figures in and responding to the searing natural spotlight created by its unique architecture is my photographic material. I focus on juxtapositions that symbolize the current psychic state of this moment in time.

I see the space as a visual metaphor for the lightness and darkness of being, the internal complexities of each stranger made visible throughout the magnetic setting of the Pantheon. Photography is a medium that has a fundamental connection with impermanence and a changing technology, and I am fascinated with the act of revisiting a space that is ancient and in tact, resistant to alterations, and yet a space that invites an ebb and flow of strangers, dancing in a spotlight together.

This work is reflective of a choreographic voice I found through photography as a former dancer. The camera’s ability to capture suspended quotidian movement is foundational in my work, and a technique I use to depict figures in hyper-real theatrical spaces like the Pantheon. The complete stilling of a figure allows for a further study into the human body, psyche, and relationship to society. It also counters the temporal and fleeting medium of dance.

Site specificity is a mandatory component in the making of this work, but I plan to refrain from providing a detailed environment. I find this reductive approach to these photographs that negates context then challenges the viewer of the work to contemplate the core intentions of it. Making a remarkable image that is a precise blend of these elements is rare.

In 2020 Italy closed its borders to Americans, and in 2021, quarantine was required. The Pantheon was not allowing visitors to enter into the center of the Pantheon. Since it was impossible for me to be physically present in Rome or to make the work as I had done before, I decided to rent a camera for a photographer in Rome, and photograph with her over FaceTime. On the solstice, we photographed simultaneously at my direction, me on my computer screen through FaceTime, and her, with the rented camera. I then composited these identical moments together, which result in a hazy uncanny reality of a double image.

I have three years left to complete this project, and I am applying to the PHmuseum grant to request support for this endeavor. The physical and mental endurance of this work demands a preoccupation with how one's photographic gaze on a contained subject changes year to year, and a question as to whether a time-honored space and its response to light and contemporary society also shape-shifts.

With this funding, I will spend all of June 2022 in the Pantheon, day after day, photographing a wider archive of images than in years past. I will work to visually describe the dramatic shift in human self-presentation due to the pandemic. I will also capture formations of movement in this visually reductive space. I plan to incorporate video over the next four years, and to create an extremely slow-motion piece that allows for a parallel study of dress, gesture, and light. The gripping unfolding of global relations will be at the forefront of my mind while photographing. I will also dedicate my time there to a much needed deepening of scholarship towards the visual references to ancient Greek and Roman art and architecture in this work.

With the enormous archive of photographs and video content I will accumulate, I will then use the support of the PHmuseum grant to concentrate on a narrow selection of the work, as well as finalize an edit of the archival work that has not been properly edited and sequenced. In editing the work, the vignetted frames I choose in these locations will be minimal in their visual description.

I aspire to make this work compelling in its representation, restrained, and hyper-descriptive in its depiction. My photographs will be intended to reveal other possible truths through the metaphor photography provides. However distant and obscured, like that of a dance performance, I am determined to provide photographic stages that are frank, relevant, and crucial archives of this moment in history.

Thank you for your consideration.