Featured project: 50 Years of Solitude
50 Years of Solitude is a portrait series of movie extras culled from film released between 1967 through 2017. The artist’s process involves first watching the movie in its entirety and then repeating the film to find the right moment to digitally capture the extra. The extra’s image is cropped from the film still, resized and converted into a single edition archival print.
(All movie titles, dates and locations are set aside for posthumous release)
In The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900, Max Kozloff writes that “movie portraits” are devoid of the power to touch us on a human level because of the glamour surrounding the subject. The larger than life status that is inferred upon the sitter blocks any possibility of authentic human element entering the picture. While this maybe true for film stars, there is less chance of this happening with portraits of movie extras. Many of the actors are in the awkward position of achieving the status of being in a film, while at the same time being relegated to the periphery. In fact, many extras work under the uncertainty of not being fully sure of when or if the camera will capture them. Star status seems to escape the extra, but then again so does obscurity. Like most of us, the actors in this series are caught somewhere in the middle.
Additional work: Selected projects 2010-2012 Enter
