Ambrotype & Tintype Portrait Series:

This series of portraits seeks to raise questions about photographic representation and the ways photography has shaped our conceptions of identity since its earliest days. My interest lies in finding the unique visual markers of personality and in portraying faces that reflect the diversity of contemporary America. Each image in this project presents a face and is titled simply with a first name.  Although the heritage of the individual may be inferred from assumptions we make about features and costumes, the descriptive language that might have been attached to such images in the past is deliberately absent.  The viewer is therefore forced to suspend the kind of thinking that would traditionally assist in decoding these images in the context of American identity politics. 

I use the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion photographic process, the same photo process that was used when many believed that photography could scientifically record and catalogue the racial or ethnic identity of a person.  Like the photographers of the 1850s, I use hand-poured chemistry that I mix myself, brass lenses, and wooden view cameras to expose positive images directly onto blackened metal and glass. Requiring extended exposure times, the process offers the possibility of looking beyond temporary aspects of personality. One must sit still for almost a minute as the features of the face itself and not just passing emotions are recorded and as the extended moment is preserved in the eyes.  My portraits present a dialectic between similarity and difference and explore the way individuals resist easy categorization.