photo portraits:
image & interview
In the last decade, Carol Moses embarked on a long-planned series of photographic portraits inspired partly by Felix Nadar’s unvarnished studies of his contemporaries. In the final installation, these portraits are accompanied by text in the form of hand-picked responses from around thirty interview questions. The product becomes a composite, generating a rich impression of the sitter in a specific time, and context through Moses’ unique lens.
+ Read More
The concept for this art project began over a decade ago when Moses saw the photographic work of Felix Nadar. When she visited the Musée d’Orsay, and saw his portraits, she was attracted to them not only for their grace and content, but also because his friends were often intellectuals, writers, poets. In addition to generally liking his subjects, Moses was deeply moved that among his cohort, he counted women intellectuals. She became intrigued with the idea of creating a photographic record of her own friends and contemporaries.
The second component of this series is the interview, which arises from Moses’ abiding curiosity about the thoughts and views of others. She composed a set of questions by establishing certain constraints, resolving to ask the same questions regardless of age, gender, occupation, relation, etc. As Oscar Wilde and others have noted, portraits tend to reflect the artist as much or more then the sitter. In this case, the strongest self-illumination is in the interview which is done at the time of the sitting. Moses has continued to be humbled and moved by the depths of her friends, family, and individuals in foreign lands, who have participated in the series and shared their stories.
