When it comes to Portraiture and communication, Youth culture has much to do with it. We are the ones fueling Facebook, myspace, google, and youtube constantly chatting and buzzing about sometimes petty situations. It is my belief though, that these social networking sites have essentially ruined the true essence of youth. These new means of communications have broken down our true nature and have left us hiding behind consumerism and the internet. These photographs are about complacency and youth.
The act of taking a portrait transcends capturing an artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. Taking any picture is a complex act of collapsing a moment and transforming that moment into an object. The kind of portraiture I am always moved by are when the artist is showing his/her audience a bigger issue on a social and or economic scale. A good portrait shows what the world is lacking. The only way to know how and why the way society is the way it is, is to look into the eyes of the people who inhabit it. On the other hand, fine art portraiture can uplift us, remind us of all that we have. This beauty that the viewer sees in a portrait is still socially important because it makes the viewer think about where one stands in the world, what one hopes to accomplish, and how we choose to pursue it.
In the book, "Look at this fucking hipster" Author Joe Mande states that "there's no substance behind any of it. Hipsters rebel against a shallow, materialistic, directionless society by being shallow, materialistic, and directionless. It makes no sense. Its fighting conformity with conformity, not fitting in by fitting in. It just so happens that their specific type of conformity involves looking very silly. It's a community of unfocused people trying to out-silly each other." Ryan Mcginley shoots hundreds apon hundreds of rolls of film to attain what he expresses as "the life I wish I was living." Even Mcginley, who is young, famous, and wealthy cannot actually have the lifestyle he portrays in his imagery, and even now it is difficult to see his imagery as existing outside his camera. Since, I'd say, the mid 1990s, maybe around the time of Kurt Cobain's death, youth culture has devolved at a seriously rapid pace. Over the past four years, as I have searched desperately for a counterculture with a strong voice and historical relevance, I have been disappointed by kids hiding behind larger issues in society. As a photographer I have been seeking out different environments and situations that portray an accurate portrait of the complacency in youth. Through a faded color palette, this series is a portrait of a world belonging to youth but is slipping away between the cracks of society and consumerism.
