Sick Day Thoughts

As I lay in bed, sick today, trying to figure out if, as my friend and subject Alee suggested, a girl dressed up like Jack Abramoff would look like Carmen Sandiego, there was a question that kept popping into my head. Well, two questions really. "Are enough people signed onto to model for this project?" and "Where are you going to find all the seemingly random stuff that this project requires?" The first question I'm not so worried about. As for the second one, I'm only two shoots into this project, and my laundry list of items I need to find already includes the following…

1. Large bouquet of flowers
2. Wedding band
3. Gas mask
4. "Bio-Hazzard" suit
5. Birthday party supplies including a hat, streamers, balloons, and noisemaker
6. Cane a blind person would use
7. Angelic cloak
8. Curlers
9. A handheld mirror

I'm sure it's stuff that I will, by sheer necessity, be able to find in the big city. But the shopping list does act as a reminder of the size and complexity of this project.

Another thing that I can't get out of my head is the discussion that my class at ICP had about the nature of portraiture. (Coincidentally, there was a girl sitting nearby that would not stop coughing, to whom I'm directing my blame for getting sick.) I have a very, very strict policy about what I believe is portraiture and what isn't. So you can imagine my reaction when my teacher said that you can have a "portrait of a moment" and assigned us to take a roll of self portraits, with one half of the roll being "representational." In other words, we couldn't feature our bodies, but instead, had to somehow create a portrait devoid of humans. So I'm pretty angry. I think that portraiture is all about showing people. And there can be incredible works of art that tell a story about a person, but they aren't portraits. 

I mention this because it has a lot to do with my project and the way that I tend to do portraiture projects. The way I see it, you can use portraiture to do two things. On the one hand, you can use it to tell the story of one person, like Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of Georgia O'Keefe. The other thing a photographer can do, and what I lean towards, is to create a series of portraits using people that are all a part of something. I like the latter style because it allows the photographer to address an issue bigger than just one person. The other thing it does, is that it makes the photograph more impersonal with respect to the subject. 

Which brings me to my overarching idea which connects my the former part of this blog with the latter. I'm not picking models based on personality, but on convenience. Because in the end, who models for each photograph doesn't matter as much as what the subject of the photograph is. That's why, "where are you gonna find enough models?" and "where are you gonna get supplies?" are really the same question. The models in this project serve the same function as all of the other supplies. The fact that Nina is a photographer doesn't matter, but the fact that she has access to large cameras and an I Love NY t-shirt meant that she would dress up as a tourist. In this project, none of the people are what matter, but rather the concept they portray. And so one of the grand themes that these photographs will  address is the ability to recognize something that is bigger than yourself.