One of my earliest photo jobs was working for a private detective. Since that time, I have been poking around the tenuous demarcation between public and private. In AutoWorks, there is always the issue of which personal details I choose to make available to the viewer. Working for a private eye taught me not only to be sneaky too but also to pay even closer attention to detail, to look for clues–to scrutinize gestures, check out clothing, see how objects were positioned in a room—and construct narratives.
It rammed home the idea that the camera can definitely lie and/or tell the truth. Also how notions of “evidence” are important, necessary, sometimes meaningless and unreliable, and pretty often really amusing.
The photos are small and intimate (2” x 3” images in a laminate that’s 3” x 4,”), so they’re ID-ish and you can easily hold them in your hand. The pictures are never displayed chronologically since I don’t think the point of the work is diaristic. It’s really not about my getting older, fatter or thinner, have long or short hair, or good and funky taste in clothes. Instead, by combining pictures throughout the years, the images parallel memory itself– circular, paradoxical, ironic, sly, and funny. You get to honor time and truth as well as deconstruct it. That way the series winds up lucid without being linear.