Some Thoughts on Photography--circa 1999

My grandmother dug this scrap of paper up the other day. It is the photocopied text of an artist statement from one of my first art shows. I think it was a show of black and white street photographs made it Scotland and England. At the time I was obsessed, and I mean obsessed with the work of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Robert Adams, Helen Levitt and company. The images were printed straight, with no major manipulations in the darkroom, save for a few filter changes and burns and dodges. Saying that this was a statement from a "show" is a bit of an exaggeration. These pictures were hung in on a bulletin board of sorts in a lighted hallway space. My mom came up from home with a car load of boxed wine and assorted cheese and crackers and we threw a little party. Still, at the end of my senior year, it felt like a declaration that I was going in a different direction. 

Here is the text:

A photograph is a strange thing. It is both a tool to jog the memory of the events of our lives and an object on its own. A photograph is portable. It's able to be ripped, faded, burned, tacked up on a wall, or thrown in a drawer. Mostly we take snapshots of silly family events, great rites of passage, ad drunken college escapades. But something happens to people when they are aware of the photographer, aware of the impending photograph as a document of their beauty, weight, current hairstyle. People become self-conscious, their smiles turn to big crooked grins, eyes become squinty, and a little powerless. Each of the photographs on these walls is about what happens when the camera is hidden, when the click of the shutter is a surprise, unheard in a crowd. I have never spoken to these people. I didn't even ask any of them if I could take their picture--but I know them and I live with them and they are my new strange friends who stare back at me late at night..I carry them around with me in an old Ilford photo paper box and I don't even know them. Photography is special that way.