In Plain View                                                                      

This work first began to take shape after seeing Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1864 portrait of a young girl, “Annie,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Cameron used wet-plate collodion process and distinctive lens adjustments to create soft-focus, almost dream-like portraits of children. She was not interested in achieving perfect sharpness as were her contemporaries, but, in her words, “Stopped when I thought it was beautiful.”

At first I set out to emulate Cameron’s style. With my digital camera and modern lenses I worked to recreate the heavenly halo of her photographs using my children’s friends, mostly girls, as models. However, as time went on, rather than letting them melt into soft focus, I found that I only wanted their features to be defined and their gaze to be direct. I realized then, as well, that instead of the mythic and religious themes of Cameron, I was drawn to concepts regarding childhood innocence, the ‘good’ girl, her growing self-awareness, and the question lurking behind her gaze—‘What is she hiding?’

This realization freed me and so I moved in another direction. With a nod to Cameron who costumed her subjects, I too, styled the clothing and chose the props to create an image where the time period is not necessarily identifiable. I selected rustic locations, a nod to my own youth near Chester County PA and to a simpler time. I made multiple exposures of each model, waiting until her face lacked pretense and a genuine connection was formed.

With the essence of my initial inspiration always in mind —"I stopped when I thought it was beautiful."