I’m fascinated by what’s often the fuzzy line between representation and reality, so I guess that explains my interest in photographer, Jaime Diamond, and her slyly subversive series, Constructed Portraits. Diamond assembled groups of strangers in rented hotel rooms, and took their picture. As she explains it:
It all began with my own family portrait. Somehow the image it portrayed didn?˘‚Ǩ‚Ѣt feel right; that behind all the static smiles and handholding hid a little secret. By taking the portrait out of the frame and off the nightstand, out of its familiar context and blown up to human scale, the cracks became all the more evident and the awkwardness overwhelming. Subsequently through online ads, sidewalk soliciting and favors from friends I began constructing families out of unrelated strangers, working around the premise that no two members of the family should have any prior associations with each other. Shot in hotel rooms rented for the occasion, the result is a permanent visual record of a family that never really existed.
...but nevertheless manages to convince. We all spend much of our lives looking for connection—we want to see it. And not just in our own lives, but in film, books, television. Diamond’s series succeeds, I think, because it comments on that need, and compels us to accept how those connections can be forged sometimes from even the most disparate-seeming of elements.
