Whiteface

I don't shoot all the photographs that I end up creating as drawings. Some are just discarded memories sold for a buck or two in old cigar boxes at junk shops. A select few are actually images that are given to me by friends or family. I confess that I like mixing up the sources of my imagery (yes, I take ownership for the antiques as well as the gifts: that's the artist prerogative) as it challenges the viewer to formulate a narrative that encompasses different time periods, people, and places. Huge temporal shifts must take place to draw a story line between the images, and in many cases those pictures that appear to be taken at a certain moment in history might have been shot with a digital camera a week ago, whereas the most modern of compositions is actually a 100 year old negative salvaged from a shack in Idaho. There's no veracity in life, why should there be in art?

I could tell you that the image above was taken on a night when my wife and I were dubbed Prom King and Queen, but I would understand if you didn't believe me. If I shared with you that this image brings me equal parts joy and pain you might fashion a narrative as to why that may be, and your version could be just as intricate as mine. 

I won't go so far as to take credit for releasing the shutter, but when I finish putting this image to paper there can be no refuting that it will belong to me. If I have any skill as an artist at all then perhaps someone else will view it someday and the memory of it will belong to them. And in this way my fiction may be perpetuated indefinitely, like so many fictions that have preceded me.