Artist's Statement
Taking Pause is a collaborative, dual portrait project that asks people to reflect on what in their lives feels most essential. With what do we identify and connect most deeply? What truly matters to us and why?
Participants are documented in their home or place of their choosing with two distinct portraits. One of themselves, their physical selves, and an accompanying portrait of their reflective selves through what they have chosen to share. Each participant is also asked to tell the story behind their selection, both orally, during the making of their portraits, and later, for the context of the long-term manifestation of the project, as a brief written text.
The goal of this project is to observe and to ask the same simple yet thought provoking question — what is irreplaceable to you — of the widest possible range of participants, regardless of socioeconomic situation.
Taking Pause combines photographs and stories in a visual and verbal narrative that explores both the complexities and simplicities of what we value. The intent is to document the differences and commonalities of these choices while engaging the spectrum of American diversity and disconnections, both political and economic: from the financially secure to the evicted to those who have lost everything in recent natural disasters.
Project description
Taking Pause is a documentary portrait project that combines photographs and stories in a visual and verbal narrative that explores both the complexities and simplicities of what we value. It is a collaborative project because those who participate are more than passing subjects. In addition to sharing something of deep personal resonance, each participant also tells the story behind what they chose and engages others to take part in the project.
The sharing of stories is central to the making of these dual portraits as each participant when photographed is asked to tell something about what they chose to share. Their story-telling influences them and is what the physical portrait seeks to document. Subsequently, my awareness of the personal story informs the making of their reflective portrait. The story provides an informed sensitivity to both portraits and, in a sense, each portrait is a documented story. While the pictures provide a visual interpretation of the oral story, it is the written word that shares it with a future audience, an anticipated audience beyond us, the maker of the images and the tellers of the stories. As such, each set of dual portraits will be accompanied by that participant’s written text for their story. This is essential for the dual portraits to reveal themselves fully and for the project to be published as a book (Initial discussions with Princeton Architectural Press indicate a strong level of interest).
Work on this series began within my local community in February 2018 with a core group of people from varying backgrounds. By the end of June, ten portrait pairs will be completed. The plan is to focus exclusively on this project starting in the fall of 2018 and to expand its community and network exponentially by traveling across the United States, returning to the East Coast by late spring 2019.
To advance and attain diversity in the series, each person who participates is asked to take some ownership in the project and, with thought and consideration, to lay forward the collaboration by engaging one or two others to help organically involve a spectrum of participants across the geographical regions and socioeconomic classes of the United States. The travel route will naturally evolve and be largely determined by the location of the subsequent contributors. The expected travel for this fieldwork will last for approximately five months, two months driving the southerly route towards California, one month on the West Coast and then two months returning east via the northerly route.
The backbone to the second phase of this project is the road trip. The road trip as a means to an end that also seeks to explore, question and connect with this country we call the United States. While the history of the road trip is rich with meaningful role models, mine is largely inspired by de Tocqueville, Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank. Frank’s The Americans, as the title implies, was an outsider’s observations on a foreign land, this project aspires for direct communication, interaction, and collaboration. America in 2018 is a far cry from that which Frank observed in the fifties or Lange soul wrenchingly documented in the thirties.
Upon completion of the fieldwork in the spring of 2019, the immediate goal is to create a book of approximately 75-100 portrait pairs and texts. Another desired manifestation for this project would be to create an exhibition that travels, and thus gives back, to the various local communities along the the project’s route.
Community
The process and experience of connecting with others — sharing stories and creating an actual network and face-to-face community — is essential to this project. Participants are asked to host me when they are able so that we can spend some time getting to know each other and so that our interaction is about more than the making of the portraits and they are more than passing subjects.
The importance of face-to-face interaction and conversation in our current society cannot be overstated. We are hyper “connected” in our dependency on devices, yet our lives have become hermetic and we are actually increasingly disconnected. Too much of our communication and “social” activity is now virtual not actual. Thus a crucial part of this project is its collaborative nature, which aspires to connect with people and share stories and spend time together. In short, to take pause, to reflect.
Taking Pause is about connecting with people and creating a collective project that will be an intimate glimpse of our country in a troubling and disconnected time. The United States, one of the wealthiest countries on earth, has a disparity in income that is unconscionable. We live in a period of incredible abundance but are we aware of what really matters? Many of us find ourselves struggling to find clarity in a sea of possessions that occupy our physical environment and block our mental space and yet whose meaning is long lost or worse, never even existed. How we manage our mounting accumulation of possessions, and the inherent wastefulness of this in terms of material, time and natural resources, has become a huge societal problem — independent of means or situation.
This project asks people to share something of deep personal importance. The question is intentionally open so as to inspire a range of responses. Some may be abstract or experiential. It need not be an object. Participants have been grateful for the opportunity to be reflective in this way and to tell their stories. What people have shared thus far is about deep memories and identity, not monetary value.
My mother, 82 and mom to 5 children, struggles to scale back a lifetime of possessions laden with memories, yet she didn’t hesitate to pick Sassy Sally, a beat up little wooden doll carved for her by her mother when she was a young girl growing up on a rural dairy farm in Connecticut in the 1930s. Sassy Sally is a family character, made up by our great grandmother, whose legendary tales of misbehavior have been passed along as oral stories from generation to generation. Sally is nasty and terrible but she was the only doll mom had as a child, invaluable because her mother made Sally specially for her. For Martha, the first participant, the decision was also immediate, “Oh Robin, it would have to have legs!” What she meant is that she would want something that connected her past to her future, that contained memories of time spent with family. For her, it was the battered and treasured family recipe book, which has inspired and nourished her family for years.
This project will greatly diversify as it expands and will be most insightful when the completed portraits and stories are compiled in the final book and exhibition. Only in these final manifestations will it be possible to view the whole of the project and for a future audience to fully relate to what others have shared.