Artist Statement:
In this body of work, I wanted to look at the classic deadpan portrait fragmented or disguised. Classically, this is more emotional work, which is a departure from previous almost analytical portraiture. The focus on eyes is almost accidental, as they are the culmination of all the emotion on the face, but in retrospect, that’s no accident.
This sort of portraiture catches people closer to how they want to be seen, a great façade of sorts, and contrasting that with previous deadpan work yields fascinating comparison. The difference between internal and external will undoubtably vary in each person, and it is fascinating how from the outside or inside alone, it is impossible to tell how far the one has departed from the other.
In conclusion, this series is trying to get at the other half. It is impossible to capture a person from just their deadpan, or just their masked, and if the whole goal of portraiture is to indeed capture a person, I want to start doing it with multiple images, to mimic the human nuance.
Artist that inspires me:
I suppose there is a little bit f everyone. As always, a variety of people inspire me. I cannot say that I work off of the work of one particular photographer or look to be like others in style of technique. It is more in specific pictures that I find somebody else’s work reflected. For example, the photo of my mother on the beach screams of a particular Jean-Daniel Lorieux to me. Most of these were experimental, I’m still trying to find a particular aspect of portraiture that calls to me, outside of the deadpan work described by Sugimoto and Ruff, so not too many people are as heavily ingrained.
