(Un)Familiar

It all started when we moved to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, USA. Watching my three children growing up. Each at a different stage. Time flies, but if you stop and think, we don't see it moving. It's only when you look at a photograph taken just a few months ago that you notice how much they have changed. That me want to record this process, not with the scientific curiosity of 'compare and contrast'. To photograph it became a way of accepting with reverence the passing of time, without the illusion of capturing it. the magic in the freedom.
Susan Sontag says that 'to photograph something is to appropriate it'. I would agree, if only the things I photograph were not children. It would make more sense to say that they appropriate me. Looking through the lens inevitably limits your field of vision. If I frame my daughter by the seashore, my two other children may be playing on the rocks, outside my reach. My eye needs to negotiate with reality: I'm torn between controlling the scene and the unpredictability of the present moment. Every time I click, I need to be aware of what is happening outside the frame. And so it is that I arrived at a type of photography that goes against the grain of the norm: eschewed horizons, soft focus, feet cut off, closed eyes. What could be described as technical failures has become my photographic language.
A photograph has as much power to reveal as it has to create mystery and suspense and to ask questions. Images can open up the senses. But in this sense, the uncanny is imagination's best friend. For the camera, reality is a field rich in multiplicity, endless, uncertain, distorted, without north or south, or full of norths and souths. Much as we try to design a scene, as I often rehearse with my children, photography always gifts us something more, and something less. This is the strange feeling that drives the photographic wish.