An Anchor, 2000, 16 drawings, ink & white-out on paper, hardbound book with newspaper cover, h 8.5 x w 5.5
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. – Vladimir Nabokov
At some point in 2000 I accidentally came across a copy of The New York Times dated Wednesday, April 21, 1999 that lodged itself in my memory for months to come. This particular copy of the Times was remarkable for the reason that it contained an article about a man named Terrance Johnson, a reporter with a camera hidden in his eyeglasses. Although a licensed social worker, he took a low paying job at a mental hospital in order to expose rampant patient mistreatment. I felt that Terrance’s humanitarian actions needed to be observed; nevertheless, I must admit that my interest in Terrance was not entirely benign. Being an image-maker myself, I felt an intense envy of his omnivorous recording.
It seems that Terrance was also aware of the awesome power that his camera eyeglasses endowed him with – just look at his expression, or more accurately, his lack of expression. I find the quirky blankness of his stare compelling because it subtly hints at a confidence imparted by the righteousness of his cause, and perhaps more significantly, by the fact that nothing can elude his observations. The fixity of his stare, as well as his emptiness, became a fascination for me.
It stood to reason that a method mirroring the intensity of Terrance’s techniques would be an appropriate starting point for an experiment. I might begin to get at something beyond the surface of the cryptic, half–toned image by staring intensely at the newspaper clipping for approximately one minute, then recreating the image from recollection. This extended method would allow a complex portrait to emerge that would both describe my subject and honor him through repetition. This would be my tribute to Terrance the undercover reporter.
The framework of serial repetition seemed simple enough; however, in short order comprehensiveness and verisimilitude gave way to an interest in scrutinizing emerging peculiarities and following their tangents. The focus became less about accumulating details into a whole than a decoding of a preexisting and surprisingly complete portrait. By increasingly relying on my recollections rather than my one-minute of actual observation, the image unlocked and allowed something unfamiliar, yet compelling to emerge.
16 drawings later I still don’t know any more about Terrance Johnson the reporter with a camera hidden in his eyeglasses, but I am very familiar with the way that his right lapel almost touches the edge of the frame, the similarity of the inverted angle of the bridge of his glasses and the open collar of his shirt, as well as the way that his eyes seem to be looking at two slightly different points. Lastly, and inexplicably, an anchor began to feature prominently in the drawings.
