First Contact

These life-sized portraits of strangers are taken immediately after my request, before familiarity intervenes. They are exhibited unframed and unmatted.

For my First Contact multilayered photographic portraits I've asked strangers to pose for me and then blended the portraiture layer with several from the surrounding location. I don’t interview the subjects and I know no more about them than I leaned from our encounter when asking them to pose. People can lose their identity as strangers very quickly. So I take the pictures almost immediately, before familiarity changes the dynamic.

My aesthetic and thematic approaches to First Contact are closely related my larger body of work over the past few years, which seeks to encourage intentional observation as a practice and a skill, and which to me is a requirement for getting the world right. This broader body of work explores the difference between being a viewer and being an observer. It is about self-censorship, about what we edit out of our view or ignore, what we leave blurry or obscured just plain avoid altogether. It is also about the cultural, ideological, and personal forces that may make disregarding the visible be reflexive or passive. If successful, the work should at least whisper to us that everything we see is a made thing.

To this end the layering of images in the First Contact portraits creates background detail that rewards extended observation. The diminished attention to facial detail and the increased level of context also beg the committed observer to invest in seeing what has been placed in their sight and to find personal connections through which they can integrate that with their understanding.