Dialogue, 2018

In Reflection: A New Approach to Portraiture

In 2018, I began including faces in my nudes and created Dialogue, an image that associates an actual profile with a reflected one. Dialogue broke boundaries, leading me to create images that invoke interior thought processes not visible in conventional portraiture. A young woman gazed intently at her reflected face, implying a conversation within herself, the kind we have internally all day, but nobody witnesses. How interesting it would be, I thought, to add reflected faces to my portraits to convey inward and outward parts of our selves simultaneously.

Increasingly as I photographed friends and willing subjects of all ages, I became most interested in older people, closer to my age.  When a good friend viewed a show I had done, she was so moved by the sense of soul and respect for age, that she offered to model. Fragile and frail at 86, she lay in the pond and displayed her indominable spirit and pride in Markings. The wrinkles in her face join reflections in the water at twilight demonstrating the inevitable continuity of our lives within nature. These new images speak to the progression of time, to youth and aging, to looking within, and to making peace with our mortality.