THE SPACE YOU TAKE. The Space You Take is a project focused on childhood and growing up and is meant to serve as quiet observations that allow the viewer to connect back to their own growing up. There is such timeliness in the way children take up and use space, the way they have no inhibitions about how they move through and observe the world. I want to capture them as they really are, in their environment, as they explore, work, and play. In doing this, I try to be mindful of photographic structure. In some photographs, I’ve attempted to play around with photographic structure, presenting a subject (children) photographed in a way that you don’t typically see, in an attempt to arrest the viewer for a moment. Childhood photography is often associated with lightness, closeness & intimacy, and a sense of innocence. I wanted to turn that typical trope on its head by structuring my photographs completely differently. In some instances I try capture a sense of anonymity - you know you are looking at children but can’t quite see their faces or you’re seeing them from a great distance. Other photographs in the collection are meant to present the viewer with an up close and very intimate view, but where you feel like perhaps, as an adult, you aren’t meant to be present.
All of this is designed to give the viewer pause – to give a sense of something familiar coming from the universality of childhood – but also to provide a sense of disconnect due to the atypical way childhood is presented. My photographs are meant to serve as quiet observations into children’s lives, small vignettes into their world. These intimate studies of their lives feel especially important right now as the future they are to inhabit seems so precarious and uncertain.