My intent is to photograph individuals without cementing them in a fixed identity or time. It is my aim that they remain somewhat remote, requiring that the viewer form their own set of concepts about the scenarios in each image. I want the viewer to feel a little lost while looking at these photographs, while also being compelled to look back and forth between them all to forge ideas about the potential relationships, situations and conditions, and also to imagine how they would look within a similar image. I want a mimetic empathy to engage viewers, and regardless of the lack of eye contact, the size and presence of the images can perform this function. I have chosen my close family as content for my photographs because of their accessibility, vulnerability, and our emotional history together. My automatic familiarity with these people (and I include myself in this group) permits me to frame them in a new context; one in which they pass through that familiarity and become more isolated and self-contained. They turn aside from the act and effort of connecting and relating to the world and to others. The indefinite environment each person floats in becomes both their cryptic location and a manifestation of their emotional moodiness and experience. I envision each image being connected to the others somewhere in that ephemeral space around each head, like an invisible thread that moves from person to person. What that invisible thread signifies is not entirely concrete. I interpret it as empathy between each member of the group, an unspoken intimacy that can be cultivated under many different sets of circumstances, and also as the inevitability of distance and aversion. This company of introverted individuals is linked as much by their familiarity as their unfamiliarity.
