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What Child is This?

Lifesized Portraits Drawn by Lauren Marie Taylor, on Display at Hostess Gallery, Portland, OR

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs- especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past- are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married woman’s wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent’s bed, the campaign-button image of a politician’s face pinned on a voter’s coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor- all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are the attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

Susan Sontag, In Plato’s Cave, from On Photography, 1977

The images displayed here are based on photographs that I took with my students in the fall of 2006 and winter of 2007 (with the exception of “Ted Smith in the Bathtub” who was not played by a student). They are recreations of scenes from my adolescence. In producing these tableaus, the students both channeled the person whose role they were playing, and in the context of that role, redefined their own identity as members of our elite community of 5th period Advanced Art students.

For me, the creation of these scenes was a way to invoke a time in my own life when my friends and I lived life without fear or consequences. Over ten years later, we are only beginning to feel the effects of our careless decisions. I wanted the children to feel the gravity of their choices and know that they had dire results for their futures. Today, only five months later, one of the boys has dropped out of school and one has returned to prison. But others have written scholarship applications, their first major research papers, gotten their first big paychecks, been promoted at their jobs, been accepted to college and continued to make the art that inspires me to teach them, like a painting of a pizza topped with eyeballs and band-aids.

1. Outside the gallery

2. Witch's Basement

3. Dorian in the Snow

4. Ted Smith in the Bathtub

All pencil, ink, and acrylic on black paper. 3 x 14 feet

Bathtub on paper, 3 x 3 x 5