Strangers
All too often we assume. We assume about people, cultures, places, it doesn’t matter what. We know one thing about a different culture because of the way media portrayed it, and we base all of our knowledge off of the one “fact” that we have a grasp on. It does not need to be about an entire culture though; it can just be about people we pass by on the street every day. Someone is upset, serious, thoughtful, in a hurry, has facial hair, unfriendly; this is the only thing we know about them in the moment. There is so much more to the strangers around than what we see. We only know one small aspect, a single story, and that’s only if we were paying attention.
In this series, each photograph is of a stranger. Each photograph was individually scrutinized to determine the one defining characteristic of each person. After identifying the one aspect that I assumed I knew about each of them, each print had developer painted, dotted, sprinkled, splashed or placed on it to emphasize the single story known about each person. The work shows what we know about strangers (even if what we know is incorrect), and shrouds the rest of the person. We know little, and often the little we know influences what we think of them as a whole.
The techniques used in producing these images was inspired by Timothy Pakron.
The inspiration for the single story and strangers concept came from the Ted Talk The danger of a single story.
