"Portrait as a Memorial/Monument"
In the past few years I have returned to a theme that has occupied me ever since I abandoned lensed camera photography two decades ago: the personal and the monumental. In the past my subject was primarily barns and farmsteads as the embodiment of the monumental in architecture. More recently this concern has been explored through the portrait, either of the living person or the figurative in sculpture. For me portrait making is always an act of memorialization, a way that we counter loss, alienation and separation.
I have been an exhibiting photographer for more than thirty-five years. In addition to numerous group shows in small artist-run Manhattan and Brooklyn galleries in the 1970’s and early ‘80’s, my work has increasingly been featured in one and two person shows in the Hudson Valley where I have lived for the last 20 years and in France where it has been anthologized in several publications.
I take these portraits by using the pin hole cameras that I have been making and using these past 20 years. By using pinhole cameras exclusively the discipline of cooperation between photographer and subject is amplified, there is no point and shoot here; long exposures require an intent and intensity not common in conventional photography; the lack of a viewfinder demands intuition in visualization.
Memory bridges the gap between semblance and resemblance. The photograph is the aide-memoire of our personal histories.
