Title: November 5th - 14:55
Medium: Super-8 film
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Resolution: 2880 x 2160
File Type: H.264 Codec / MP4.
Comments: In the middle of the day I met my friend Lily at the C/O Berlin photography museum. She brought her friend Christina along to see a Mary Ellen Mark retrospective exhibition. I always thought this german museum had some of the best contemporary and conceptual photography shows in the world. A place I would aspire to show my photography someday. Mary had passed away a few years ago and was an icon in the photography world in the class of Arbus with a photojournalistic eye. From the South to the psych wards of the US in black and white to the slums and brothels of India in color she documented the fringes of societal norms. There were some amazing photographs of Mother Teresa with a shining cross tending to the sick and poor. There was one large room that really struck me deeply. It was her large format polaroids. Two projects together. 20x24 Polaroids of high schoolers and their prom dates in black and white. The other in divine alignment with my photography was her twin portraits at twinsburg, ohio during the twins festival in color. I loved how Mary played with the same medium with different projects in different tones as if expressing the inner and outer worlds of intimacy and connection. Conditional and Unconditional love in a way. Conditional as an agreement in black and white like pen and ink on paper, unconditional as a rainbow expressing and exposing the world rich and colorfully. You would rarely see her color photography until later in her work. What makes the shift over time? From light and shadow to color compliments? How does an idea reflect the way you convey it through saturation or not. Lily and I had a long conversation about the prom portraits. Who was the stronger person in the frame in the relationship. Who was the leader and the lover. She said the women held all the power in the pictures by the way they were standing and looking into the camera. The man was happy and proud, the woman full of questions. It was a heated debate. Then there was one picture of a man with a few women which made us laugh and found our agreement that he was just a player at the prom. Christina found a delicate portrait of a woman by herself. It was the only one like that. The woman in the picture looked just like her. When she put on the headphones to listen to the story of the girl, as this was part of the exhibition, she learned that she was battling cancer and was bald because of chemotherapy. Christina too had battled and defeated cancer and lost her hair just as the girl in the picture. It was a powerful encounter not just for her but for us in the room. So we made this portrait to honor them both, to honor Mary Ellen Marks legacy and influence on my work. How do we interpret the works and create a connection to the person in the photo, their story, their gaze? We are all humans on this little rock around the sun standing in front of a glass lens then a part of ourselves is left until developed and hung on a wall for others to see years away. How then does someone feel or respond to that image of yourself or myself? Do they see what we see or is it different because time went along and things changed except what's in the photograph. When you see a portrait today, then 10 years later. Is it still the same picture? Are you still the same person? Maybe, just maybe, every moment you have with an artwork is precious. Because the next time you will feel differently, based on the food you ate, the company you are with, the state of mind you are in or the world is. The beauty of art is the encounter, and the re-encounter will never be the same. The photograph keeps time frozen, while everything around it changes constantly. Even in death, the photographs live on. What kind of pictures do you want to make and hang on the wall? For me, its pictures of people. Because we are all so alike, yet so different. We all are alive, and we die. Being human is beautiful and painful. The art is what connects us across the world and generations past and future. We are all human, we are all the same type of animal. It's funny what some light, glass, and chemistry can do to our self-awareness and understanding of time itself. The invention that changed the world. Like a mirror, yet the silver nitrate is fixed forever. It does not disappear like our reflections do when we walk away from the surface. Roland Barthes said when you photography something it dies, though I believe that when you photograph something that is actually the moment it takes on a new life.