150 photographs
Archival inkjet prints
13"x19"
Two side-by-side wall scaled projections
Hand-bound large format book
Rice paper
Inkjet prints
13"x19"
Portraits in Light is an archive of 150 portrait photographs. I began this work in 2012. These portraits
attempt to represent the individuals I met in Lethbridge, to chart the network of my social relations
and the complex interconnectedness between these people. My project explores and celebrates my
community; its conceptual relevance, however, extends to other groups and to other communities.
My portraits grow from an exchange between my subjects and myself and are made in a classical
portrait style using a soft light while I emphasize my subject’s gaze in a three-quarter pose. My subjects
are at once vulnerable and yielding. Each person’s appearance is clearly articulated but his or her social
status is cast in doubt, placed on the same symbolic level. Each person is depicted as if without clothing.
The process of making these photographs is very important to me. I photographed people that I met in
Lethbridge; these people are my friends, my school and work colleagues, my students, and friends of
friends. I enjoyed the portrait session as an extension of our relationship; these moments are like the
unspoken experience of being; this is valuable to me and to my artistic practice.
In the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, I presented three instances of this archive: photographic prints on
the walls, two side-by-side projections and a hand-bound large format book. Each of these presentations
shows the same images but each does so by drawing out qualities unique to their formal means.
The wall-mounted prints reveal the totality of the portrait archive all at once, in a single view. The two
side-by-side projections show the photographs as temporal proximities. The subjects’ relations to each
other are seen to change as well. One projected image touches the other. This movement, nearness
and durational quality of the projections engage the physical presence, the live space of the viewer.
The book of portraits invites the reader to touch and to linger over each portrait, to contemplate
a materially bound artefact and, importantly, to consider each subject uniquely.
This project focuses on the idea of community and charts the relations among individuals within a place,
my former home in Lethbridge.