I use photographs and photography to explain to myself and others, the way in which I perceive bits of the world; to explain my experience within the world. This project specifically was a way to work through my thoughts and understandings of family relationships between myself, my sister, and my mother. It was about trying to understand how those relationships between the three of us change with time because we continue to change. It was about understanding the relationships when one or more are no longer present. Executing this work last spring term I kept the project visually very simple - only three Van Dyke Brown images repeated in a set of rows and columns. There was an equal number of each image, but the repetition of the images I altered in accordance with the presence of each individual throughout my life.
I think that choosing another artist’s work that exemplifies where I want to go with my art is difficult only because I do not know where I am headed. I have come to realize that photography can teach me nothing about a person. A portrait or candid can never truly teach me about someone, yet I am still so obsessed with searching for information about and understanding of someone [or as stated above a relationship] within their image. Christian Boltanski’s 10 Portraits Photographiques de Christian Boltanski 1946-1964 is a wonderful example of showing how photographs can lie and lead one astray as they take the portraits for truth. I like a lot of his work but I really like how simple and candid these portraits are, leading the viewer to think nothing of the possibility of being led astray and lied to (after all, who would lie about simple snap shots?).
