In Absence of a Portrait: The Mrs True Series
Arts
Studio Art
For close to a year, I have volunteered in the archives of the Museum of Art & History here in Santa Cruz to help transcribe the diaries of Mrs. Mary Ann True, donated to the MAH by the Lund Family. It took time for my colleagues and I to decipher Mrs. True's handwriting, but we became familiar with her style and prose and soon got to know her better through each entry and through our own individual discoveries. Having gained a sense of intimacy with the author, and having an intrinsic leaning towards the visual and image, I inquired about photographs of Mrs True in the archives. Learning that the museum archives contained no photographs of Mrs. True I decided to take the matter of her portrait into my own hands. Photography being my primary form of visual art, I concluded to fabricate my own portraits based on mine and my fellow transcribers' collective ideas and perceptions of what Mrs True may have looked like by creating digital composite photographs. Each composite is a collage of existing portraits of ladies from the 1890's from the archives that were carefully selected and rephotographed.
This project was conducted in phases, the first of which took place in the MAH archives where I selected portraits of women in their 30's and 40's from the 1890's to resemble the age of Mrs. True in the decade that was currently being transcribed. I then crafted a portable photography studio in archives (as materials are not permitted to be removed) and rephotographed the selected portraits. I chose to rephotograph the selected portraits and digitally scan the negatives rather than utilize scans of the portraits themselves in order to create a sense of distance and removal that would be visually apparent to emphasize the metaphor of imagination and perception in the face of absence.
The next phase consisted of scheduling and conducting interviews with my fellow transcribers working within the 1890's. I asked questions that would allow the interviewee to draw their own ideas about what they imagined and perceived Mrs. True to look like based on their transcription experiences with her diary and took diligent notes of their answers. The digitized negatives were then organized according to each interview, where specific features appearing in a rephotographed portrait matching a description in an interview would be placed together. Gratefully, the interviews all produced a variety of descriptions, each person having a substantially different perception of Mrs. True's features.
The most challenging phase was then to craft the eight portraits. Each photograph is a composite of different features from different women pieced together to look as similar to the individual descriptions in the interviews. The portraits were crafted in Photoshop and each one consists of about 7 separate portraits. My experience in digital compositing and collaging is considerable, but having never composited portraits before I was excited for the this new challenge. Compositing took a sizable amount of time, as well as proof printing, since the prints exposed small areas that required adjustment before final printing could take place. Once the exhibition prints were finalized, they were trimmed, mounted, and framed with precision and much labor.
I was charmed with the outcome of the portraits. The desire to refrain from allowing the portraits to appear too lifelike facilitated an aesthetic of deformity that I likened to imagination and the perception of the mind's eye. The contortion and irregularity of the portraits conceptualized how we cobble together an image of a person in our own mind when we have written details but no images, similar to imagining a character from a novel. Imagination is not precise and these portraits reflect that.
Since this project dealt with a permanent collection at the Museum of Art & History, I was able to organize an exhibition of the project there. The Mrs. True Series was displayed as a solo exhibition at the MAH from January 21 through March 25, 2014. The exhibit also included a vitrine containing some of the diaries as well as insightful quotes from transcribers and an informative artist's statement. Even though the exhibition was a great feat, it was in actuality not the final phase of the project.
During production I had contacted Otto Lund, the donor of the diaries and the descendant of Mrs. True. I informed him of the project and expressed my desire to finally see a photograph of Mrs. True once the project was completed. Mr. Lund answered my request, and with much appreciation, paid a visit to the museum archives with a stack of photographs on February 10th. I was ecstatic to finally see several beautiful portraits of Mrs. Mary Ann True, including her wedding day photograph and a tintype of her at the age of 22, and to listen to her great grandson regale us with family history and anecdotes. Even though the exhibit had been on display for three weeks, I did not consider it complete until the day I finally got to hold a portrait of Mrs. True. She looked nothing like what we had all guessed.
The Mrs. True series was funded by the Irwin Project Grant offered by the Elena Baskin Visual Arts department at UCSC. The project was proposed and awarded during the Fall Quarter, 2013.
