Student Portraits: Face + Hand

Face + Hand started as a somber project to remember the faces of students I’ll never see again. With the School/Co-op schedule, all the friends you make in one term recede into an Instagram feed or Facebook timeline. As a self-proclaimed photographer, portraits were the immediate and absolute solution to this. I wanted to remember their faces, but also all their names. A digital typeface was too impersonal for this task and I had to consider how these names would be presented. To be at the mercy of Flickr or Facebook’s CSS would not convey the intimacy and connection I intended. I had each of my participants scrawl their name into my commonplace book with the 0.38mm gel pen I got from the Muji store in New York. I believe having the subjects write their own name in their own handwriting adds further depth to the portrait and celebrates the individuality of each person. Superimposing these signatures directly onto the photograph makes each image look like a one-of-a-kind autographed poster.

I was eager to finish my roll of film (Lomography’s X-Pro 200), so I began snapping photos of some fellow 1A students. That’s when I realized this project doesn’t have to be a memorial slideshow featuring Sarah McLachlan, exclusive to those I’ll never see in school again.