hero-2470-The Artist
One Thousand Heroes This was the first of this series. I had been following https://www.facebook.com/JRartiste for some time when I began to think about how captivating the West African and South American portraits were. Was it the subjects? The lighting? Was he some kind of magician. I began to think there was something about the face itself. So I shot some tests, this one was one of the first. BAM. I was hooked. It was me, but it wasn't me. I had never seen myself in this context, that is to say without context. I suddenly could see the millions of details that made the symbol I call my face. I was hooked. I shot my family and realized after about 30 portraits that there was a narrative building here. That's when it dawned on me that while I was in fact taking photos of the people in my life, what I was REALLY doing was capturing the social framework that defined my personality. What kind of people influence me, put up with me, encourage and inspire me? That's when this stopped being a simple project about adornment and the beauty that is inherent in the human face and started to be a sort of biography. About something much more important... me. Well, important to me at least.