Social Distance - 2020-2021
Social Distance is series of 8x10 ambrotypes made from my front stoop in E. Kensington, Philadelphia from March of 2020- Summer 2021.
The 8x10 camera is somewhat of a spectacle. Philly people are nosey and they want to know what you're up to. The wet plate process was important to my image-making during the pandemic because it demanded a time commitment from a sitter and produces visible results within minutes. Most people have never seen the process and the novelty holds their attention. There is also a morbid romance that collodion brings to a portrait of a person wearing a mask in 2020. Some of the older people I’ve photographed have mentioned that masks in photographs harken back to the Spanish Flu. But, I think of the American Civil War, and the parallels of mass death and trauma that we are experiencing as a society. After all, Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner were making wet plate photographs.
The Pandemic posed so much danger and risk, and yet, my process and practice thrived under these conditions. The architecture of Philadelphia row homes and packed nature of my neighborhood, meant that many people were close together and could not connect. This work was possible because my neighbors were longly and board, they were looking to entertain themselves and their children. They want mementos of this deeply scarring time.
I tend to make photographs in complicated places. These portraits are no exception. E. Kensington was, at one time, Philadelphia's industrial heart. But, moving factories overseas in 1960 and 70s, raised poverty levels, brought an IV drugs market and gutted the area. We are now in the second phase of gentrification, with a massive new construction boom. My neighbors are working-class Irish people who have lived in the same homes for generations; artists who bought property fifteen years ago and are now white-collar professionals.
I posed myself outside my front door with 8x10 camera and my neighbors couldn't not help but ask questions and engage. Over a series of multiple sessions, I collaborate my subjects to tell intimate stories of how they nurture, support and protect each other. Through gesture, expression, the placement of bodies and the manipulation of perspective, I depict a wide range of families who live within walking distance of my front stoop. I use these portraits as a means to explorer, community in a time of extreme isolation.