Yes, sir- I am here! In this series, I have shot slides of old World War II propaganda posters, projected those slides onto live models, and then photographed the results. They are shot on film, then scanned, and cleaned up in Photoshop, and printed in various sizes from 11” x 8.5” to poster-size. I wish that I could say these were the result of brilliant calculation, but the fact is that this series began by accident. I was helping a friend who was doing a series of collaborations concerning his British mother’s diary from World War II. He was wanting to project wartime imagery onto a model, and I had brought along a transparency of a British propaganda poster to try, among other things. We did not use that image (we could not get the poster to “fit” the model), but I’d liked the effect, and I have since created a series of nearly fifty of these. This series was never intended to be a simple political statement- many people see these as very antiwar, although when asked exactly why, no one can quite say. I like that. The only references to our current war that I had imagined at all was noticing a contrast between the sacrifices asked by our government during the Second World War, and the extreme reluctance of the current administration to do so now; and the willingness of the American people to make sacrifices then, compared to a relatively self-centered, hedonistic culture today. A compliment to the wartime generation, if anything, yet some of them seem to be the most offended by this series; that I am somehow making fun of their efforts, which I am not. The other noticeable factor regarding reaction to this series has been viewers’ support or opposition to our current war, although, as I said, I’ve found it very interesting that when pressed they are often unable to articulate exactly why they feel the images relate at all to the current situation. From my experiences showing this work, this series has turned out to be much more psychological than political, people finding in them what they already feel; a mirror. To me, they are as much as anything about the human body, and mind, as a blank projection screen for governments’ propaganda- objects to be used through the influence of questionable information, if not outright nonsense. I initially just liked the feel, the mood of these images, the way both the model and the person in the poster lose their identities and meld into someone new- which, I guess, was the goal of the original posters. |