Shared Portraits
Jane Waggoner Deschner
For over twenty-five years, I have utilized found photographic images in my artmaking—found on magazine pages, they were the material of cut-and-paste photomontages. During graduate school, I became fascinated with vernacular photography, especially in its most ubiquitous (and human) form, the snapshot. Since 2001, I have collected, studied and altered early- to mid-Twentieth Century snapshots and studio portraits, press and movie photographs—worked to uncover what this rich repository can teach about our essential humanity. I’ve created over a dozen series, more than five hundred artworks. When we look at snapshots that are two, three and four generations old, what is immediately obvious is what has changed. But, when we look into them—we discover what has remained constant. We are reminded of how we are to one another.
I’m aging and my maternal side wants to pass on what I’ve learned. I want
to moralize about accountability, acceptance, love, honesty, compassion, integrity, authenticity, gratitude and generosity. I appropriate and integrate the found photographs of strangers with the embroidered words of the famous.
Sewing binds photographs together; embroidery inscribes a quote. Stitching by hand into these photos both destroys and mends. I puncture and suture, wound and heal, simultaneously. It is an intimate activity, meditative and, sometimes, physically painful because of the tedium of the activity and the osteoarthritis in my thumb joints. I connect with generations before me.
Creating garments from stitched-together snapshots, “wearable-photo-albums,”
is a recent direction. I craft a narrative in the snapshots I choose, sometimes enhanced by an embroidered quote or image. The garment is a metaphor for ways we identify ourselves, as we do in the photographs we choose to take. Our photos, our clothes—what we shed when we pass on.
The camera records dispassionately; snapshots amount to a shared portrait. Selecting, covering, repeating or juxtaposing enhances content and
offers poetic interpretations. The untitled underneath series conceals
the snapshot’s focus under a intensely-colored geometric shape. The
album series reveals a photographer’s unintended quirk.
We all snap photos of people and things we love and times we want to remember. In a studio, we hire a professional to immortalize us looking our best. When I alter a photograph’s original intent and appearance, the viewer is invited to deduce, speculate and fantasize. There are many ways to appreciate ourselves
in the common photograph—even those of people, places and times we never knew.