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                                               Portraits and Personalities
                                    The Repression and Realization of Emotion

The portrait is defined as a “painting, photograph or other visual likeness  usually of a person, especially one showing the face. ” I have created four portraits of emotion that are represented by two images one with the presence of the figure and one without. These images depict the emotion’s repression through the figure’s absence and the realization of it through the figure’s presence.
To create this body of work it has been necessary for me to take on several roles: director, set designer and photographer. I assign an emotion to each person I photograph, give them a dialogue and create a space for their emotion through the narrative of objects. The space becomes a movie set. It is bizarre and colorful, charged with a tension of something that is manifesting in the objects that wants to be acknowledged but cannot make itself known. I confront the set with my camera and capture the emotion dwelling in the discomfort of the space by itself. The presence of the person confronts the camera and his body language and tells the story of his or hers emotions.
 The portrait titled Grip depicts the repression and realization of anger. The picture of the space is a cluttered room full of objects, stacks of shoeboxes, skateboards, and pictures that progress into the center of the room. There are two blowup dolls on the edge of the frame lying one on top of the other wrapped in chains. In the back of the room there is a mural of a city with white painted buildings, one of which is on fire, against a forest green wall. The accumulation of objects in the room represents the accumulation of anger. The burning building and the treatment of the blow up dolls depict acts of aggression toward others.
The image with the figure in it is of a person from the waist up directly in front of the camera, with the cluttered space behind him, flames of the burning building framing his head. He is holding a gun in one hand and a meat sandwich in the other. A tattoo of a heart shaped hand grenade on his bare chest drips with blood. He is in a fit of rage. Everything in his body is activated in his lunge toward the camera. Even the expression on his face, open mouthed wide-eyed, furrowed brows, shows that he is angry.