Artist Statement
I grew up in a house surrounded by books—with one television set tucked away in a back room and strict instructions to not turn it on unless I or one of my sisters was very ill. As a result, I struggled for sources to sooth my ravenous hunger for images, and for storytelling through them. When I went to friends' homes, I wanted TV playing in a near constant loop. And when I went outside, I flitted from advertisement to advertisement--feeling a part of my frantic brain soothed and engaged. "This is the story they are trying to sell," I would say to my mother, who would supportively ooh and ahh as I tried to predict what an image told me about who the brand was hoping would see it, and what they wanted their audience to believe both about themselves and the product being sold.
I didn't understand this pull towards images and fascination with their ability to create narratives; all I knew was that I seemed to be the only one in my family who had a compulsion-like draw towards any storytelling that was shown through pictures and media. I remember once being in a hospital Emergency Waiting Room, tiny legs swinging on a chair, with my eyes glued to a news station playing on the small TV in the corner. Even though I wasn't interested in the subject matter, I couldn't look away. I was drawn to the method of Speaking through images, although I didn't know it yet.
Photography was not a big thing in my household. I and my sisters barely have any childhood photographs, and those we do were taken by my grandmother once every few years on one of her visits.
My grandmother was my first introduction into photography as a career. A brilliant woman born into a patriarchal society, my grandmother poured almost all of her energy and effort into supporting her diplomat husband. Photography seemed to be the only thing she did outside of him—a form of self-expression that showed who she was and how she saw the world.
My grandmother loved using black and white photographs to create energy out of still lifes (her photos shown left). One of her favorite things to photograph was Old Master paintings: she would take a section and hone in on it, celebrating a detail and drawing attention to a sliver of the image, distorting it with lighting, angles, and selective focus. I heard about her success from my parents—about her collaborations with galleries, and her pieces sold at auction, put into books, and immortalized at the Smithsonian—but my grandmother rarely spoke about her work: why she did it, how she got started. We didn't even speak about her photography until I was a teenager and beginning my own photographic journey. My biggest source of information about her as an artist came from the artwork itself, hanging on our walls and stacked away in portfolio boxes.
My grandmother had the ability to imbue her work with an otherworldly quality. I always felt, looking at her work, that anyone who tried to recreate what she saw would fall short in their attempts. As I got older, I eventually got the sense that my grandmother's photographs were her use of the voice she suppressed in her day-to-day life: stripping away the barriers of witticisms and charm she used in conversation, and showing the truth of who she was—not in totality, but in morsels. Previews of who she was as a wistful scavenger and explorer of her life.
A woman so enveloped by perception and projection in her life and in her husband's career, my grandmother's willingness to open up and show the world who she was through her art, I think is a testimonial to the exposing quality of photography: showing not just what you photograph, but who you are.
"The camera doesn't lie," is something my grandmother used to say. And I disagree: I think the camera can lie. But my grandmother used it to tell the truth, about her subjects and about herself.
This to me is the heart of storytelling through imagery. It is a combo deal, a two-for-the-price-of-one: through an image you are told both what is seen and who is seeing it...a story of duality and cause and effect.
For the photographer, you are guarded and exposed by the lens. For the observer, you have more than one story to engage with: the story captured on celluloid or pixels, and the story of how the photographer wound up there, why they chose the subject they did, how they chose to frame the story and what they chose to leave out, how the moment was selected, and what happened afterwards or even because of the photograph.
It is a combination of these aspects of truth, self-expression, and storytelling that makes photography so magical (in my mind) and drives my work. That compulsion that drove me as a child to seek out glimpses of television and analyze advertisements now acts as a siren song to seek out the stories that surround us: the stories we tell about others and the stories we tell about ourselves.The camera may not lie, but it also tells multiple stories at once. This beautiful dichotomy is something I strive to investigate through my work as I, like my grandmother, capture what I am drawn to in the world: the narratives that surround us and the narratives that we create ourselves.