Ten Strangers

To create this work, I asked ten people to be photographed together. Though these subjects were all known to me, they were strangers to each other.

The instruction was to squish together as if they were bread dough expanding and morphing to make themselves fit into a rectangle bread tin. There is a level of vulnerability that I have asked of these subjects, to put themselves into an intimate situation with new people, who they trust by extension of trusting me. There is both responsibility and risk in that, as there is in any situation where we decide to let someone in or to open up to a new person. 

I photographed this happening in small details over and over again. As time went on, the bodies of the participants settled into the nooks and crannies of each other’s bodies and found new spaces to press against. 

Photographing in this way pushes the element of time to the forefront of what it means to make a portrait. Even if I had wanted them to remain perfectly still and repeat the shots as exact replicas over and over again, I wouldn’t have been able to. Making portraits means trying to capture an organic, always changing thing. The subjects' feelings of comfort and discomfort ebb and flow. How we relate to people around us in constant flux, even if we don’t notice the minuteness of the changes ourselves.