THE ANCESTOR SERIES
2014 - Present
The Ancestor Series is an extension of my collage work. I collect old hand drawn, painted, and photographic portraits. Some of them are more than 150 years old. For this series, instead of cutting and pasting various elements together to create a new image, I use various three dimensional pieces from my eclectic collections and place them on top of the antique portraits and make a photograph.
The new portrait gives these mostly anonymous nineteenth and early twentieth century people a new life that extends into the twenty-first century. Not unlike a portrait session in a photographer’s studio, I sometimes use the same antique portrait to make a variety of new images. One unique fact related to some of the original photographic portraits is that many of them are convex and would have been displayed in a large oval frame with curved glass.
The task of finding three dimensional objects that are both interesting and appropriate in scale and color to add to the original portraits is challenging. This work is all made in camera. I use Photoshop to prepare my files for printing, but unlike many wonderful creative people, I do not build my images digitally.