Projects

Learning from your Audience

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I am always interested in how people respond to my work, and particularly what they see in it. It is wonderful when I get feedback in person, which I got during the recent opening of Witness Marks at the Off Ludlow Gallery in Cincinnati. A roughly 5-year old boy came in with his father and they slowly walked through the exhibition, looking carefully at each photograph. When I asked the boy if he had a favorite picture, he pointed to this one:

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When I asked him what it was about that picture that he liked, he said it was because all the CD cases were black on the top except for the one exactly in the middle, which was green. “Huh!”, I thought, as I looked more closely at a photograph I had viewed scores of times in the last year. Sure enough, there WAS a green jewelcase nestled in the midst of the others that I had never noticed before. That tiny little detail made a difference once I saw it, as it became a demarcation line, creating two opposing sides and interrupting the flow of CDs on the bookcase. Sometimes it takes the eyes of others to awaken us to what is there:

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Culling & Editing a Project

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In April of 2018, I began working on a series of pictures that slowly evolved into a project titled Witness Marks. To date, I’ve taken over 3,700 photographs, which, in the digital age, isn’t very much considering what’s possible. But it is an overwhelming number when it comes to trying to make sense out of the work.

I have committed to exhibiting this work in a show in October 2020, and am working hard at choosing images for it. I’ve been using Photo Mechanic 6 to view, organize and manage all these photographs, and it has helped me to quickly be able to prioritize them. After narrowing them down to about 120 images this way, I reached the point where I needed to print them in order to physically be able to look at and organize them. For me, culling and editing on a screen only goes so far, as I find it way more informative and helpful to physically arrange and move pictures around in space. I’ll be in this phase for a while.

Cutting up contact sheets

Cutting up contact sheets

Arranging and choosing images

Arranging and choosing images

When a Project Finds You...

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In my experience as an artist, I have found that sometimes I have quite consciously looked for, chosen, and worked on a project. At other times, a project has found me. This happened to me earlier this year when I spent two months cleaning out the house that my parents had lived in for nearly 70 years.

One morning, I walked through the dining room and saw the shadow of a chair being cast against a door. What I registered was how empty that chair-shadow looked, and it made me think of how the family would never again sit around that table to share a meal in that house. I took a picture of it... just because it seemed important to.

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The next day, the sun streamed through the bathroom window. After showering, I opened the door and saw that my silhouette was being cast onto the opposite wall. I remembered the photograph of the chair I had taken the previous day, and suddenly realized that these shadows perfectly summed up what I was experiencing at that time: loss, the fugitive nature of time and memory, emptiness.

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I realized that these pictures could speak for me at a time when words were simply inadequate, and kept taking them for the next two months until I left the house for the last time. I'm now sifting through the more than 3,000 images that I took, still amazed at how suddenly this project emerged, and how it found me when I wasn't even looking.