Last year I produced the second of three photo books of portraits (see photo 1) that I’d taken from 1979 to 1989. This photo book focused on self portraits taken during that period plus small polaroids taken in 2000. I’ve always been fascinated by portraiture: school pictures, mug shots, images used in newspaper stories and obituaries, and portrait photographs from myriad sources. At first my picture-taking wasn’t for use as image-making for drawings and paintings as much as it was to document friends, companions, and myself. The photographs taken eventually became subjects for the large drawings I focused on beginning in 1983, when I also began to take photographs expressly for use as the sources for portrait drawings.
In the spring of 1979 I was accepted into the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of Michigan. That summer I decided to photograph some of the people I’d gotten to know (see previous blog entry). This was when I took my first self portraits (see photo 2). This became the beginning of my interest in portraiture. I was going into art school with a concentration on sculpture as this was my focus at the time but that was about to change. In a house where I was renting a room, I discovered that its dark basement had a cleared out area next to a stone foundation wall. It was a good set-up location for one of my photography class projects: a series of photographs taken in the dark using many lit wooden matches and titled In the Dark Basement. The flame—scribbled around my body in continuous lit strokes—illuminated my body, in both standing and seated positions (see photo 3).
Not sure if it was out of boredom or a fit of artistic inspiration—it could have also been the influence of my art school state of mind—I set up a tripod and attached my camera five feet from the side of my single bed (above which a painting of burnt wooden matches hung) and began to take an extensive series of self portraits that became the series, The Melancholy Art Student. Sitting impassively or posing, I would click the shutter, hear the audible timer as it counted down to the shutter release while walking to the bed to sit down, and wait for the shutter to go off (see photo 4).
By the time I finished school and was ready to move on, my interest was two-dimensional imagery: painting and drawing. After graduating in the late summer of 1981, I packed up all of my belongings, squeezed into a car, and drove to the city I had chosen to move to: San Francisco. Once settled into a rental living space, I set up a table to finally begin creating personal work that wasn’t a class assignment. During my year and a half in San Francisco, I took many self portraits. I sat on an old cardboard box and looked out the window to see the people and cars going by and documented that (see photo 5). I also took photographs of me sitting in front of the work surface I created, using a wooden door on legs (see photo 6). At the time, I had begun to develop post-art school work; I began cutting out photos of people from the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and from Interview magazine and altering these images by adding typed phrases from my imagination and song lyrics from bands I was listening to: The Cure, Talking Heads, and Wire. All of this carried over to the portraits I began doing once I returned to the Midwest.
In the spring of 1983, I quit my job and moved back to Ann Arbor. It was at this time that I felt I needed to use my own images to base drawings on. I was curious about using a black drawing surface to build up the image from the blackness using layers of color. I liked drawing on black paper, and wanted to continue to do a portrait drawings using the same media. Having myriad friends meant having subjects for portrait drawings. I sat friends down next to diffused light from an adjacent window for photographs, both to record a particular chapter in my life and as subject matter for future portrait drawings (see photo 7). Drawings, based on portrait photographs I made during the years 1983–86, became the focus of my attention.
In December 1986 I applied for and was offered a job at a New York City environmental planning firm. So during only a two-week period at year’s end, I gave notice, packed my belongings, and flew to New York to begin another chapter of my personal and artistic life. I stayed at a fleabag hotel in Hell’s Kitchen where I took my first self portrait in New York City (see photo 8). I eventually moved into an apartment building in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood in Brooklyn where I set up a studio space in the living room. I continued to take self portraits in the dining area of the kitchen where I used two of them for my first large self portrait drawings (see photo 9).
I eventually bought a small cottage that was situated in a former Russian artists’ colony in Southbury, Connecticut, where I once again set up a studio in the living room of the house. On the afternoon of Saturday July 1, 2000, I had a motorcycle crash on a winding country road in Washington, CT. I was airlifted to a trauma unit in Waterbury where I spent a week recovering from the near-death accident in which I lost my right leg just below the knee. I then convalesced at home and used my studio as a recovery room. A hospital bed was brought in and my mother came from Michigan to care for me. For the next three months, I used a small Polaroid camera to take a series of self portraits of a sickly-looking and damaged man (see photo 10). Except for the sickbed Polaroid series in 2000, the year 1990 spelled the end of my concentration in self portrait photography.
I’ve always been drawn to image-making through photography—from setting up plastic Civil War figures in a circular dirt area of our backyard and photographing the military scenes using a Kodak Instamatic camera in the mid-1960s to using an iPhone to take photos of interesting-looking people on the subway or “selfies” when the mood hits me. This way of quickly capturing images has fascinated me for much of my life.
