Truths and Things I Made Up About These Women

I have two websites, this one and ‘martycoleman.com’. That one is moribund and I no longer post to it. But I did in the past and there are many posts and galleries there that aren’t on this website, especially in the area of photo-collage, which I have done extensively since the 1990s.

I am posting those series at ‘The Napkin’ over the next few months.

The first is called ‘Truths and Things I Made Up About These Women’. The germination of this idea started when I was photographing friends. I was in conversation with them as they posed and came to learn certain things about them. Later, as I was doing the collages I would think about how the viewer would see them. They would nothing about these people but they would have some impression from the image. But what if I put some verbal hints of who she is, how would that affect how the viewer saw the person?

That led to me laying out a list of true things about the person, things they had told me, and then adding in one (or more) things I made up. Why not just say true things? Because I like the idea of the viewer having to think about their own perception and to engage with that perception to think deeper about how we judge and come to conclusions about people.

The text is small in many cases as they were originally created to be seen in large format in a gallery setting.

Here is a selection from that series. Let me know what you think in the comments.