todd edward herman
LENSCRATCH Article by Jade Lascelles
The photographs in this exhibit are excerpts from my forthcoming book SANCTUARY, which focuses on themes of social conformity, domestic confinement and bereavement.
Sourced from photos made by myself, family members, and culled from the surfeit of imagery found in AI databases, the images in SANCTUARY are sometimes theatrical and absurd, while at the same time appearing to be observational. Each photograph reenacts an unpictured or imagined moment from a childhood filtered through archives of familial relation and photographic convention. Each reenactment of a personal history suggests that of a shared or collective one.
The organizing principles of this work are often contradictory, revising my own memories, perhaps adding a layer of previously unexpressed emotion to them, while upending the very methods of my revision. As autoethnography, these images push the limits of their own credibility, falsely insinuating the position of a photographer who is never entirely present as either subject or author, while still alluding to a long list of feelings and understandings and stories of affiliation and conflict that are not completely fictional.
I hope that in some way viewers can join in my appreciation of this.
—Todd Edward Herman 2023
VIEW EXHIBIT Wildest Most Beautiful Ugly
DARIA Article by Stacy J. Platt