A 1970’s photograph shows me behind my father’s old Nikon, more than half of my small face obscured, my elbows a tripod on a rough picnic bench creating an inverted V. I cannot recall who photographed me photographing them head on. We were at an annual family reunion in some park in Los Angeles County. Only 11 or 12, I was secretly proud that I had been tasked with taking family portraits. Even at that age (or maybe because of that age), I was drawn to interacting with people, but through the safety of the mediation of a camera lens.
In the over three decades since that family reunion, I have never taken a photography class, using books to teach myself the Zone System and how to tilt the lensboard of my 4 x 5 camera. Instead of art school, I earned a bachelor’s in philosophy, a law degree, and a Master Brewer credential, all from the University of California. My philosophical studies unwittingly informed my later photographic explorations. In philosophy, my focus was epistemology—the study of what we know and how we can know it. I was very interested in limits to claims of representational truth. As I more and more keenly believed visual knowledge to be fallible, I took more and more still life photos, as if to convince myself of the solidity and existence of the external world.
I am interested in limits to claims of Truth; I doubt the infallibility of even the visual. As such, I am interested in the limits of photography. I explore various problems of visual knowledge with my Toyo 4 x 5 film camera. My Abstract Portrait Series, for instance, makes manifest that visual knowledge is fallible. Portraiture hides more than it reveals: every facet that is reified obscures many more. That portraiture obscures is made explicit in the “abstract” portraits, with the model seated behind frosted glass. Yet even in the “representational” portraits, in which I asked the model to do something they would not normally do, this representation is dubious. Dubious because each shot looks unposed to the viewer, despite being a construct. Dubious because the models’ choice of what to reify in 1/8th of a second necessarily hides the multiplicity of selves, gloriously mutable, in any one person. Finally, the portrait as the representation of a person is dubious because the concept of the “self” is itself a construct.
Michael Lasher