Exposures

To enter the studio was to take part in an occasion. Each sitting carried weight, for both photographer and subject, a moment of intention before the lens fixed what might endure.

Of the roughly 80,000 negatives once produced, some 25,000 now rest in the Library of Congress. Yet even within that remarkable archive, identification is often spare. A name scratched onto a negative, sometimes nothing more, and at times not even that.

From there, the work begins.

We turn first to the record, newspapers, city directories, fragments of public life where names and faces might meet again. Increasingly, we also employ artificial intelligence, carefully and with restraint, as a tool to assist, not to conclude.

What follows is an effort to restore presence, to move from anonymity toward recognition, and to return, where possible, a life to the image that once held it.