‘Sentiments on The Void’ is the idea that emotion exists in a face supposedly devoid of emotion. I have been intrigued by human emotion for a long time and I am curious to see how different people interpret a facial expression that is supposedly devoid of emotion. Emotion is something people seek in a face no matter what the case. It is inherent for us to read emotion, and the human face captivates that in the most sublime way.
By requesting the subjects to give me a blank stare and relax there facial muscles I am opening the door on to how being devoid of emotion still can have emotional undertones, and addressing the question of whether or not a person can be emotionless.
I have shot a variety of people with a 4 x 5 view camera using black and white film and the negatives are scanned into a computer and printed digitally at a scale of 16 inches by 20 inches. The subjects themselves are asked to have an illusion of nudity and to not wear jewelry of any kind, no trace of make-up, and have no visible tattoos. The shots are from the neck up and therefore create a personal, yet disembodied interaction between viewer and art. As the photographer I too feel I am a participant in this series, for I, in a sense, will be the only true constant in the photos; before every shot I say the phrase ‘blank stare’ with the hope that my subjects will focus on the idea, and there thought process as the image is taken will dwell on my words.
A question I often ask myself is ‘what is a photograph?’ From a standard premise a photograph is an image created from light hitting a light sensitive surface. But how does a photograph function? For me the function of an image is to manifest a reality of its own. The image itself is real; it exists. At the moment I am working on the concept of space on a two-dimensional plain, or more importantly, within a photographically made image. I started exploring this question on accident. After developing a blank sheet of 8x10 film I let the developer dry on the surface out of frustration. When I retrieved the film the next morning, there was an intricate pattern of crystals panned across the surface. I contact printed the film, scanned it, and discovered a vast amount of information could be viewed and that I had created an image that not only held trace of its creation, but a something that was beautiful, something I’d never done, a non-representational image. My methods were simple enough in the beginning, take a blank piece of 8x10 film and let d76 dry on the surface. But there seemed to be a lack of control in the image, I wanted these images to be more, to have depth and dimension, an area where the viewer could mentally enter the image and explore. I eventually questioned where could this be pushed, and these are a few of the experiments I produced. Artists such as Sommer, Duchamp, Ubac, Moholy-Nagy, Eric Mutel, Minor White, Bellmer, and writing by Sommer, Dali, and Songtag have been informing me on methods and courses of creation. Creation is the force behind this body of work, which has become a sort of documentation of constructed existences, and the two-dimensional planes they reside on.
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