Artist Statement

The Family Portrait Project is a postmodern representation of the family.

It challenges the long established paradigm of what a family is and deconstructs our concept of what a family is supposed to look like. Simultaneously it lays bare the constructed reality inherent in all photographs. It abandons naive notions about truth and meeting cultural expectations. Instead it portrays the family as a collection of individuals, each unique, yet bound by ties represented by formal elements to form a group identity. These ties may be of blood, love, a sense of obligation, or purely legal in nature. Spectators are free to engage with these portraits and reach their own conclusions.

The family is the central building block of any culture. But in recent years what constitutes a family has evolved a great deal. They now come in all shapes, sizes, colors, configurations and no longer conform to a one-size-fits-all standard. Nor must they struggle to meet the appearance of doing so. The molecular structure of society is in flux.  Values, definitions, boundaries on artistic, geo-political, cultural, and historical levels are being challenged. The family unit is merely a reflection of these upheavals. I seek to capture not just the visual representation of the postmodern family but the disturbance to its method of portrayal as well.