Abandoned Hands
I was once told by a portrait photographer, that the most difficult thing to photograph was hands. There are simply far too many ways for them to look awkward, and too few ways to make them feel natural. There is an intangible disconnect, that is elusive at best. That is something that always stuck with me as an artist. The more I thought about it, I realized that the difficulty comes from that fact that our hands are naturally so expressive on an almost subconscious level. Most of us are unaware of the nuance they project during even a quiet moment. If we think about it, they quickly become forced and unnatural, like trying to control a dream.
Since discovering this bridge between our hands and the subconscious, I have been fascinated by the concept, yet struggled to depict it artistically. You see I am, to a large degree, a still life photographer. As it turns out, the only thing more difficult to photograph than a person’s hands are hands without a person: gloves. So naturally I tried; a lot. I had mixed success. I was able to make some interesting images, but none approaching the subtext one finds in simply observing another's hands. Then one day as I walked the streets of Soho on my way to work, I saw a discarded construction glove. It had an elegance and gesture to it. There was nothing artificial in it's pose, it was natural and honest. I took a photo, not knowing what I would do with it, only that I wanted to remember that encounter. Then day after day I saw the same thing. Everywhere I looked were gloves, some lost, some thrown away. Rubber gloves, fur lined leather gloves, children's mittens, all being passed over by hundreds of busy people everyday, only to be swept up and forgotten in a landfill somewhere. Everyday I was commuting through this gauntlet of abandoned hands, and I never even noticed. I felt compelled to tell these fleeting stories.
I adopted a journalistic / nature photography aesthetic, never moving the gloves, or introducing my own lights. I challenge myself to pull the narrative out through camera angle, cropping and post production. I wanted to maintain a certain honesty and wonder to the images, as if the viewer had organically discovered them on their own. A person's hands can allow us a glimpse of the self they don't share with the world. Similarly these gloves, adrift in a sea of entropy, may give a window into the consciousness of the universe they are at the mercy of. To me there was a wonderful duality in them. The vibrancy of these symbolic effigies, subject to the whims of raw chaos, playing against the melancholy of elegant, mute orators, cast off and forgotten. Trampled under foot.