The stories in these books are informed by the structure of supper talk, messages left on phone machines, ruminations of long walks and reminiscences evoked by photo albums and rainy Sundays. My use of the first-person implies the autobiographical I of each subject. Their gospel, their memory, even their distortion is truth enough for me. Evolving more from the tradition of portraiture than biography, more satori than objective profile, these books are the result of long-time relationships. In the process of writing, I took liberties that a painter or photographer might take when a subject sits for a portrait. The result is my view of their view of themselves. A turn of phrase, fragmentary memories, years of thought and conversation, were shaped into stories, poems, diagrams and interior monologues. Many selections were developed out loud by way of readings and performances.
Originally, I conceived of each book as being directly proportional to the size to its subject. So a taller person has a taller book, a wider person, a wider book... Here’s a picture of he original mock-ups. For the photographs of these “dummies,” I sought out people with extremely exaggerated bodytypes. As it turns out, when you reduce most of us human beings to a rectangle, we’re all pretty much the same size. The book as a metaphor representing human form, experience and soul are everywhere in book etymology: the spine, head and foot of a book: the body of a book; book jacket, etc.. The notion of a person’s life as a book that writes itself is reflected in everyday expressions such as: I can read him like a book; You can’t judge a book by its cover; It was the start of a new chapter in my life, etc... Similarly, the nomenclature of typography is filled with allusions to human form and personality: Each letter is a character. There’s typeface; type-family; the head, beard, ear, eye, hairline, shoulder, arm and foot of a character of type. Variations of typestyles include: old face, new face, fat, thin, bodytype, etc.. In the Portrait books, each subject is typecast (if you will) into a distinct typographic attitude or configuration depending their personality and speech patterns.
I never intended on grouping these books by gender. As it turned out, my own sense of shame and lack of identification with being a guy, led me to four unique men who I deeply cared for. Together they showed me that it was okay to be a man; that I in fact am a man, and that needn't be defined by acts of violence, being consumed by sports, or an inability to express feeling. As a quartet of men, these four books share common themes. Each subject is a survivor of extremely difficult circumstances in their youth. While they reacted to those challenges in very different ways, they all became characters in their respective worlds, and are linked by recurring concerns, obsessions and patterns.
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