KK
I have been an exhibiting photographer for more than thirty-five years. In addition to numerous group shows in small artist-run Manhattan and Brooklyn galleries in the 1970’s and early ‘80’s, my work has increasingly been featured in one and two person shows in the Hudson Valley where I have lived for the last 20 years.
“Portrait as a Memorial/Monument”
In the past few years I have returned to a theme that has occupied me ever since I abandoned lensed-camera photography 15 years ago: the monumental as personal and as memorial. In the past my subject was primarily barns and farmsteads as the vernacular embodiment of the monumental in architecture. More recently this concern has been explored through the portrait, either of the living person or the figurative in sculpture.
For me portrait making is always an act of memorialization, a way that we counter loss, alienation and separation. By using pinhole cameras exclusively, the discipline of cooperation between photographer and subject is amplified, there is no point and shoot here; long exposures require an intent and intensity not common in conventional photography; the lack of a viewfinder demands intuition in visualization.
Memory bridges the gap between semblance and resemblance. The photograph is the aide-mémoire of our personal histories.
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