Mirror

It’s that I don’t like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room. Helmut Newton

Given my love of photography and making pictures most of the time I made a few pictures of a friend getting ready decades ago. What I saw was the first glance of something very different from my own experience and something that has interested me and captivated my curiousity ever since. It’s a relationship to clothing, fashion, and self-image that manifests so clearly when confronted with a mirror. Ever since that point I’ve tried to capture that in most of my photographs related in any way to fashion and portraiture of female collaborators. I’ve also taken the opportunity to be a fly-on-the-wall with small cameras whenever I can grab candid moments similar to my frirst experience.

That opportunity comes less frequently than one would imagine, it doesn’t work if it’s setup, even when it’s not it often isn’t as candid with many people as it would be if there was no camera. I started making these snapshots with my small 35mm cameras years and years ago. I still do it today, typically with smaller cameras that are not my “work” cameras and I usually make them in the context of getting ready to go make the real pictures for a client or an experimental concept or some similar endeavor.