What I’m Looking For

“I am looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing some part of themselves (physical or otherwise). This is for an art project. No other relationship will take place outside of being photographed.” My ad received many responses, mostly from men. After they initiated contact, I would set up a meeting where I would try to capture photographically whatever these people wanted to show me. Early on I realized that much of what they wanted to reveal couldn’t be contained in still photos, and I started integrating these images into a video. The fifteen-minute video is a riff on this adventure, a somewhat fictionalized version of the strange intimacies and connections formed between my subjects and I. I have been working with the moving image for the past twenty years and the move to the still image has pushed me to ruminate on the nature of photography, the desire to control time, and the persistence of vision. What I’m Looking For is the first video I’ve made utilizing the internet, both as subject and resource and I was amazed by the incredible richness of interaction possible on the web, the unexpected play of fantasy, projection and desire as well as how boundaries between public and private are navigated differently than in actual physical space. When I moved, with my camera, from virtual to the actual space, I found my focus turning to the central importance of evidence of the physical world; exulting in the lush intimacy of details, the wrinkles on an ear, the spidered veins in the white of an eye, the elegant curve of the nape of the neck, the irregular rhythm of crooked front teeth.” (Shelly Silver)