| "I used to think I couldn't lose anyone if
I photographed them enough" - Nan Goldin
From the day we are born until the time we die, we
are recorded, filed, categorised, filmed, fingerprinted
and eventually toe-tagged; in an effort to affirm
and re-affirm our own existences - in this sense,
photographs of people are no different.
To shy away from revealing the face in photographs
is to accept that we cannot always take people at
face value; and to presume that a person can be faithfully
depicted in a "head and shoulders" portrait
is to discount all that is unique to the individual,
and to make a generalisation based on physical appearance.
Moholy-Nagy was on the right track when he suggested
we look inside the body for a true representation
of a person - and whilst he literally meant to look
inside in the forms of x-rays and scans, his words
can also be taken as an invitation to explore the
mind of the indivdual and interpret what one finds
there.
What we own, who we associate with, the memories
we hold dear, our families, our culture, beliefs,
and our actual physical likenesses are what makes
us each who we are.
Photography now permeates almost all aspects of modern
life in the western world, and the most common manifestation
comes in the form of the snapshot, laid out in the
family photograph album.
The album is at the same time a testimony to those
living, and a memorial to those who have gone. Likenesses
are kept fresh, and places in history secured in what
Nan Goldin describes as the "form of photography
most defined by love".
Inherent in these family snapshots however, is the
forced smile which makes its appearance for the sake
of the camera, and disappears shortly after the exposure
is made. So when we look back at these snapshots,
we can never be entirely sure if events were depicted
faithfully, or if the final image is the result of
being chided to 'smile for the camera... stand up
straight... stop hitting your sister...'
With this sense of family, history and memory comes
a need for a Sense of Place. Keri Hulme described
the emotional pull of home when she wrote: "O
land, you're too deep in my heart and mind / O sea,
you're the blood of me", in her novel 'the bone
people'.
To go home to is to return to one's roots, and to
all the memories it holds. Thus an image of one's
home (be it spiritual or physical) can be a powerful
metaphor for the person themselves.
This body of work came about from an assignment done
for a social documentary paper in 1999, in which we
were given the task of making a book of photographs
about ourselves. I became interested in the concept
of depicting a person in images (namely myself) by
producing images which represented the individual,
but did not necessarily show their actual face or
body.
I set about taking photographs of metaphorical objects
and places which represented those things I consider
to be most fundamental to my being.
From there my fascination with photographing people
grew, and with it a determination that I was going
to find alternative ways of depicting people - whether
they be subtle or blatant, in an attempt to prove
that there is more to people than the shells we occupy.
The shells themselves however, are objects of beauty,
and worthy of admiration...
Many of the people in this book appear a number of
times, because as Baudelaire said, the inner self
is too "complex...transitory and much too fluid
to be delineated in any single depiction." So
they are visited and re-visited, and presented to
the viewer as being multi-faceted, and worthy of a
second glance....
Which of course, they are.
Adrienne Pitts
February 2002
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