Family Snapshots

The series Family Snapshots is inspired by Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man.

This allows me to throw a wide net using images of all kinds of people from all different

backgrounds and nationalities. These are archetypal images: a mother and child, wedding pictures, a woman pregnant with her first child, etc... These types of images mark the passage of time and emphasize our mortality, evoking memory and interpersonal relationships.

There is a decay/renewal aspect at the core of this work. The first step in my process is destroying the image with solvents that cause the emulsion to deteriorate and melt implying not only the painterliness that I strive for but an animation, energy, and manifestation of aura, breath, and life that contradicts our conventional notion of a photograph distilling a moment in time.

Through the process of making this work, there is an excavation, a literal peeling away of layers to reveal that which lays beneath that is akin to exhuming something that has been entombed.

These layers serve as a metaphor for layers of personality and identity; what we choose to reveal or obscure, our visions of how we perceive ourselves as opposed to how we present, layers of skin, of generations, of self.