I began my emulation project emulating Duane Michals. His works describes the schism between conscious behavior and unconscious thought. He tries to photograph what cannot be seen. Conversely, this blog’s body of work is consumed with the surface of things. While gestures changes, they are always the same range of kissy faces, drunken faces, sexy faces, comatose faces.
Barbies are a loaded doll to pull out of the toy chest. While I’m aware there are many other subversive photographic uses of barbies, the experimental film, “Superstar,” by Todd Haynes (a biography of Karen Carpenter with an all-Barbie cast, in which Haynes shaves away at Carpenter’s doll as time lapses and her anorexia worsens) stands out most in my mind. Barbies are the signature of plasticity—and while I certainly see that manifested in this blog, I am drawn more to the emotional distance a Barbie exudes…although the subjects of the blog do not smile like Barbie, their expressions invoke the same apathy towards life.
I have left out busy party crowds from the backdrop to single out figures in the foreground—the lookers who get slapped with flash first. Of course, the crowd asserts the importance of these people in the foreground as standouts—and r the purpose of this sit, especially—how great the party was.
My tendency towards portraiture happened suddenly but intensely in the process of shooting the dolls. This pull has me thinking about how the subjects of the blog attempt to project a self-image in these photos. In terms of technique, the intensity of flash tends to illuminate a single person in the foreground of a photo, so the transition to portraiture feels logical to me. Do thee subjects value individuality, or is individuality just a front for extreme egoism?
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