Portfolio Category - Portrait Awards 2014

These four layered images are all meticulously constructed from the reassembled archive of Norman Schroth, a mid-20th century commercial portrait photographer. The formal portrait often served as a self-edifying confirmation of one's middle-class status as well as a testament to a wholesome and flawless public image. Prominently displayed formal portraits became a vital trophy in many homes as the happy nuclear family acted as a litmus test for the success of the American dream. Over many years I furiously hunted down and reassembled Norman's oeuvre of nearly 12,000 images and have spent hundreds of hours sifting through and cataloging its contents. I began compiling and separating similar poses and likenesses, by age and gender, and stacking them to produce these four images. Each print is comprised of twenty photographs of completely different individuals that have been carefully aligned and layered. The subjects' identities fade into each other, erasing unique features while highlighting the astonishing similarities. This process creates painterly photographs of fictitious "central types" showing idealized individuals. When a woman, baby, child, and man are produced and all brought together, the group of photographs show an ideal family unit in mid-century America. These black and white photographs become frenetic, ghostly reminders of a society's effort to mainstream identity into normative roles of the nuclear family.