In the Studio

As the year has come to a close, the Face of Brooklyn project is also nearing completion.

The portraits have all been selected, adjusted, and uploaded to Flickr. Helena has emailed everyone who supplied us their email address their portrait . The final image files have been produced to meet digital archival standards and will soon be delivered to their final home at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Those of you who requested a physical copy of your portrait should expect an envelope in the mail this month.

What appears to be the ending of this project gives way to a new stage of work for me in the studio. During the last six months I have been acting as a demographer, of sorts; cataloging the people in the city parks of Brooklyn and carefully noting appropriate information about each participant. In doing so I have met the objective that spurred this project; to make a contribution to the Brooklyn Historical Society's portrait archive. In doing so, it was my intention to give pictorial representation to a larger spectrum of the borough's residents than what I original found when first combing the archive.

Now that this goal is met, I am anxious to re-assuming my role as artist by reacting to the 240 portraits that I made during this project. In a sense, the portraits I collected now serve as raw material for me to explore and react to.