We are all fascinated by images of human faces. The first picture I took with my box camera at the age of six was of my best friend at school. Over the years, I’ve done portraits for hire to show people at their best, improving their social mask, as well as other portrait series that strip away the social mask to find the human, the vulnerable or the universal. I believe a successful portrait reveals more than mere appearance to have broad and lasting significance.
Although portraits have been in my artistic repertoire since the 1970s, it is photographing bodies in nature, especially abstract nudes reflected in still water, that has dominated my fine art photography career. In 2018, I expanded my nudes in water to include the heads of models and made an image called Dialogue that associates an actual human profile with a reflected one.
Dialogue broke boundaries, leading me to create images that evoke interior thought processes not visible in conventional portraiture. In that photograph, a young woman gazes intently at her reflected face, implying a conversation within herself, the kind we have internally all day long, but nobody witnesses. How interesting it would be, I thought, to add reflected faces to my portraits to convey inward and outward parts of our selves simultaneously.
This new series In Reflection was inspired by a photograph of a young woman. It has evolved via work with models of different ages into portraits of older people, bearing life’s experience. The images speak to the progression of time, to youth and aging, to looking within, and to making peace with our mortality.
