FILM STILLS
The age of photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private. — Roland Barthes, 1980
The focus of my still photography has been, in large part, about anonymity in public space and what one might infer from visual manifestations of private thought. When the individual is embedded and anonymous in a crowd, private emotions surface. This was once the province of 19th century novelists, who explored intimate, private struggles by imagining reckonings taking place silently within the mind of a given character. That literature, in turn, was what drew me to certain early and mid-20th century photographers, who, in portraits of anonymous strangers, were able to impart aspects of character, mood, and implied thought and feeling.
Having extensively explored private revelations through still photography, I was drawn as well to a different and, at times, deeper visual exploration through a time-based medium, video. The aim was to visualize active thought, isolating subtle streams of consciousness and mood as they occur over time, with a particular emphasis on attention and interiority.
The still images in this series were extracted from video shot for a 2014 film, Oneiric, from the word, oneiros, meaning a dream or dream-like state. This was a time, particularly for western societies, during which attention moved further inward, largely due to the proliferation of laptops, cell phones and social media. In effect, we began our training in earnest to pay less attention to our surroundings as we became increasingly accustomed to looking down at screens, turning inwards. It was a pivotal time in which public space became a refuge of anonymity, security, and, ironically, privacy, our minds free to wander.