Woven Portraits

Portraiture and photography have similarly impossible missions: we don’t see a person by looking at their portrait, and a photograph is not a window into another time—it is an object. I want this ongoing series to acknowledge these impossibilities, but not as dead ends. Portraiture has always had in it a certain longing, and a photograph has always been a mechanical and tangible thing. This is a striking conflict, which has its own way of conveying meaning, because, to me, portraits and photography have another similarity: they both hide as much as they show.

Winter Solstice Pinhole Photographs

Each year I acknowledge the winter solstice by making a series of pinhole photographs, at latitudes as far north as I’m able to travel to. It feels right to use sunlight to make images in this raw way that requires only the most basic, handmade apparatus—no lens, no electronics, no film—when and where it is most scarce.

These photographs were exposed directly onto vintage silver-gelatin papers through 0.3mm brass-cut apertures. The papers themselves, which had been stored in complete darkness for decades, had waited for this small one- to 180-minute exposure to light. In fact, time can be considered synonymous with light in the context of photographic processes. I want to contemplate what this says about darkness.

Time can also be considered synonymous with the motion of our planet. For the 2019 winter solstice, I traveled to Ostrobothnia, Finland; for 2021 Fairbanks, Alaska; for 2022 Iceland; and for 2023 Canada’s far north—each just just south of the Arctic Circle—the very edge of polar night on that first day of winter. The distant, low sunlight that reached my cameras there had nearly missed the earth completely, which, like clockwork, was already beginning its march toward spring. In the end, time is only rhythm.