Awards

This project was selected for the Center for Documentary Studies Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize (2021) for Portraiture. 

Service as in Active Care as in Free

Our project is called “Self-Portrait Service,” as we work in the service of our collaborators: their needs, desires, and visions for imaging themselves. We (Sam Richardson and V Haddad) help create portraits that the subject owns and determines. Each subject directs how we create their portrait – prior to creating these images, the participants speak with us about their vision around the what, why, and how. We take whatever steps necessary and possible to create their portrait. 

Ownership

We include a contract, or bill of rights, determined by and for each individual regarding their image and its future use, rather than a legalese release form. The person depicted continues to hold power after the image is created; they have ownership and control of their image-afterlife and their image-future.

Archive

We are creating an archive through a collaborative public that de-centers and shares power, rather than a proprietary lens. We have begun this portrait practice through the incidental links born out of our chosen families, lovers, and queer community; but have extended our collaborations through word of mouth and are interested in the visual records or documentation (historical and contemporary) of queer community in an organic, wider sense.

Text

We ask that after the photographs have been made each collaborator write in response to their experience. These responses are meant to be an expanded space for our collaborators to determine their own narrative and story which accompanies their photograph. One might write to process their experience with us, of image, of photographs, of being denied power in the past or perhaps traumatic, or empowering, experiences of identity and imaging.