Transfigurations

These images are from 'Transfigurations,' the result of a collaboration with painter Silvia Willkens of Mainz, Germany. On vacation in Umbria in the summer of 2000, Silvia, my wife and I went to Assisi to view the Giotto frescoes. Later that year I was visiting Silvia's Mainz studio. We were playing around with her paintings and she held one up in front of her face. I took a couple of frames. From this casual playful moment grew the entire project and it took us in directions we did not expect. We worked in her studio with her Early Renaissance-inspired multi-panel paintings and models over a period of two years from 2000 to 2002. Inspired by the faces of Giotto and della Francesca, we used the paintings as masks, the identity of the flesh-and-blood model merging with the painted image. The resulting photographs move forward and back through time and the picture plane, between real and imagined personae, theme and variations in a visual fugue. All the work was done in-camera, without digital manipulation or collage.