Capital City Arts Initiative

The Carson City | Carson Valley Portrait Project: Exploring Community
essay by Marcia Tanner

Spore’s approach to portrait making is deceptively simple. He asks his subjects to pose neutrally, as though they are having a casual conversation. “I give little direction,” he says, “but I try to avoid the smiling ’snapshot’.” He centers the subjects in the frame and prints the images the “contexts” are lively: the café’s funky jumbled interior, the bare wall and patterned carpet in an upstairs hotel room at J.T.’s.

Spore is acutely aware of the long, rich tradition of portrait photography as an art form, and has thoughtfully considered his place within it. Unlike celebrity portrait photographers such as Richard Avedon and Annie Liebowitz, he tries, as much as possible, to be invisible in his work. He wants the subject of the portrait to be the subject. His model and inspiration is Michael Disfarmer, a commercial photographer working in rural Arkansas in the mid-20th Century who made hundreds of family portraits of ordinary working people. In the 1970’s, Disfarmer’s images were discovered and later collected in book form.

"When I first viewed the book of Disfarmer portraits I was immediately drawn to the simple, straightforward, evenly lit style," Spore says. "There was no 'artistic interference' between me the viewer and the people he photographed. [I had] a profound sense of privilege -- a sense of being allowed access to a private and real person. Disfarmer’s subjects dressed simply and presented themselves . . . without pretense. There was an honesty and directness that I found compelling and in stark contrast to our contemporary world of advertising and fashion." [2]

Whether or not it is possible, let alone desirable, for an artist to be totally objective and entirely self-effacing is open to discussion. The medium of photography lends itself to such questions more than others, because it is supposedly the medium of “truth” -- although that notion has been so thoroughly challenged as to be discredited in recent years, especially since the advent of digitally manipulated photographic images.

Even without that technology, the claim that photography can present unvarnished reality is debatable. There is always someone, an actual person, behind the camera, who is making choices about what will be seen in the photographic image. This is especially the case when that person is an artist. Spore might aim toward a factual way of representing what he sees, but there is a thrilling creative tension between detachment and commitment in his work. Underneath the cool, apparently unemotional presentation of his portraits is a highly subjective vision and a passionate interest in the subjects he depicts. Why would we look at them otherwise?

He admits as much:

"I am interested in exploring -- and having the viewer explore -- questions of community. Even in this age of television and our heavily mediated society, we each live in a unique community. What does it mean to have large-scale portraits of people in a community displayed in a gallery exhibition? What is the artistic experience? I hope the images will stir up questions about personal decisions. “Why do I live here? Do I feel part of or estranged from these people? How do people create a community? How do people define community? What are our shared values? How do we approach diversity?” These are all important questions in examining our experiences and ourselves." [3]

Beyond these questions is the inescapable fact that you are looking at portraits of real people who were photographed in a real place in real time, not so long ago on the streets where you live. Whether you know them or not, your encounter with their images here and now may make you see them in a new way, may create an emotional bond between you and them, may even pierce your heart.

Marcia Tanner
Berkeley, California
February 2004

2 Email from the artist, January 26, 2004.
3 Ibid.