Elizabeth
I have loved listening to and reading stories since I was a little girl. Stories are how I first learned about life and love, failure and success, defeat and triumph. Because I moved often as a small child (I’m on my 18th house in 22 years), it was sometimes difficult for me to make friends. During those times that I didn’t have friends, I found refuge in books and stories. It didn’t matter to me if they were true or not, I just loved learning and imagining.
I realized at the start of this project that everyone is the story keeper to someone else. We listen to eachother's stories, we care about their successes and failures, and we bear witness to eachother's lives. Because of this, I concerned myself with creating portraits of stories.
In each of the photographs I had my subjects, all friends, pick any story they wanted about their lives. Some of their stories are funny, some are sad, some are painful. In some of my images I captured the creation of their story; in some I document its end. I enjoyed capturing the images where they were engrossed in the creation of their story or where they were acting naturally, forgetting that their hand was any different from its normal state.
Each of my friends wrote their own story on their own hand. I feel as though our hands are the way we create and express ourselves in the world. It's like you can look past everything that has ever happened and realize who a person is and what s/he really looks like by looking at that person’s hands. I thought that writing the stories on hands would be an appropriate and simple way to show the person I photographed as I know them, rather than just how anyone would see them. I wanted most to create a slightly unconventional portrait, one that focuses more on a glimpse of the inside of the person by portraying the outside.
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