Blackout
Tempera Paint and Pigment Print on Paper, 110 x 110 centimeters

By removing signifiers common to the classical genre of portrait photography, this work questions the inherent biases brought to photographic portraits by artist, subject and viewer. Large-scale photographic prints on paper are worked over with tempera paint in order to leave only the sitter's body language and their surrounding environment for interpretation by the viewer. The work explores the formal and historical relationship between painting and photographic portraiture.