Claudia's Doll and Windows

I strive to produce portraits in which the subject's personality and some of their story come through. One of the images submitted, "Woodland Crown," resulted from the model Jim spontaneously placing twigs around his head and then taking on the appearance of Jesus. I have found that many models are visual artists, and as models they are “still performance artists,” i.e, given the chance they will put something of themselves into a pose. This conclusion led me to do a series of photographs that looks into models’ persona. Over a period of six years I photographed models with each other, with props I asked them to bring to photo shoots that are important to them or which help define them as people, and with my wife Claudia’s childhood doll Janie. They created poses that showed their feelings at that time, relative to the props and the doll. The props and the doll became windows into their souls, in what became a collaborative project between artist and model.