The Brooklyn Rail

My photographs undergo procedures that are not normally considered proper to good photography. In 2017, for example, I made a photographic portrait of and with my grandmother. It was titled Maternal Line. This photograph deconstructs the exchange that occurs whenever a photographic portrait is made. When we take a photograph of someone, we’re seeking to apprehend something of that person by way of a light-sensitive surface. So, when I asked my grandmother to make her own inscriptions on my 4 by 5-inch negative with her pens, I was asking her to trace herself directly into that surface, without any mediation from a camera. Importantly, this process didn’t subject her to a scrutiny of her appearance. Instead, she was an agent in her own depiction. I also asked her to smear some of her saliva on the film, a trace of her genetic code. I then printed from that negative in a darkroom to make a large color photograph. I could only ask my grandmother to undertake the actions just described because of the intimacy we shared. Isn’t that sense of intimacy something we all seek when we photograph somebody we love? Cameras capture only the appearance of things, an appearance partly determined by the imposition of certain prescribed pictorial conventions. In contrast, the direct recording of the trace of her hand and a sample of her saliva ensured my grandmother was made manifest within and as my photograph. It is a portrayal of her, but also of our relationship. Given photography’s indexical tracing of the being of the world, any complication of its identity also complicates that promised fidelity. Maternal Line’s wilful disruption of our expectations might seem like a betrayal of photography, but it is also what makes my way of making photographs entirely truthful.