Holding Photos – Presence of Absence

It’s a Saturday night and I am in my studio. With my new printer, I have been getting inspired to print from all the various little projects I have going. Since I started clipping/saving images from the newspaper, I have been moved by images of people holding photos of their loved ones. It is usually someone who has disappeared – missing or dead. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo helped make it a understood political act to hold the image of your missing child as public protest. Tonight I made a grid of images I have in my computer – scanned from newspapers, magazines and grabbed from the web. When see together, the gesture of the hands holding the images speak about the loss, love, anger, and the absence. I notice more.

And babies & artist interventions

Art Worker’s Coalition (Frazer Dougherty, Jon Hendriks and Irving Petlin)”  1969-1970

Still trying to write my essay for ‘Photography & Atrocity’ book. I was thinking about artist interventions and this photo came to mind and typed in ‘and babies’ to google and the first 3 were these photos.  The words make us look. We read the question, pause and read the answer.  Tbe image stares at us stays in our consciousness.

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Now thinking about Robert HEinecken and his interventions with magazines. I never made the connection with this work and mine, but now it is so clear – the cultural images we desire/cherish (beauty ads/family snapshots) and atrocity photos that have numbed us. There is a LOOK AT THIS in this combination that I strive for in Reverb and other of my works putting my family photographs in juxtaposition with my family photographs and self portraits.

Memorializing and Gifting – Michael Reagan


great slideshow
Drawn portraits of British, US and Canadian service personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan – created by artist Michael Reagan. A Vietnam War veteran himself, he has produced more than 2,000 drawings for the soldiers’ families free of charge. He told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme he wants to document all of the Allied troops killed in action.