FULL LENGTH PORTRAITS OF NATIVE AMERICANS:

Living in the American West in the 1990s, we made many Native American friends who wore incredible regalia in ceremonial events. I was always fascinated by its beauty and impressed with the dignity that came with the wearing of it. I began to reconsider my earlier 8x10 portraits and wondered if I could shoot an entire person in a series of those 1:1 contact prints.

In order to try this, I had to build a camera stand that would enable me to move the camera and strobe light at a set distance, in a grid, from frame to frame. It was not long before I discovered that, because each frame is taken from a different point of view, the images don’t always match up from one to the next, and the end result is slightly staccato.

A single image enlarged would have been more uniform, but I wanted to maintain the detail of the 1:1 relationship and produce an end product that would speak to the photographic process.

These portraits continually remind the viewer of the photographs from which they’re made. And while all the information of the subject matter is included in piercing detail, the final image is not just strictly a “copy” of what you would see with the naked eye.

I might have won my argument not only with subject matter, but also with scale, in these images! The scale is very close to that found in reality. Hanging in my home, these full length portraits often take people aback momentarily, before they realize that they aren’t “real.” Close enough, it would seem.

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