FIFTY SEVEN AMERICAN PEOPLE

One of the great strengths of photography is its ability to render a tiny spatial and temporal fragment of the world with uncompromised specificity. Fifty Seven American People is a collection of photographs portraying people doing little or nothing, in familiar ways, in ordinary places. These images are iconic in their specificity and make no effort to idealize or universalize. None of my photographs of beautiful women are about beauty or womanhood.

People frequently comment that my photography feels cinematic. The images often seem to present a narrative that extends before and after the particulars in the spatial and temporal fragment. This narrative, nowhere actually visible in the photograph, is implied by the visible particulars. A closed door might suggest that someone has just exited or—depending on the emotion apparent in the image and that of the viewer—that someone is about to enter.

Some photographers strive to construct a definitive, apparently timeless portrait that is deliberately rid of authentic setting and detail. I am interested in a spontaneous, authentic fragment that, by narrative implication, reveals something beyond the visible particulars. The particulars spawn the narrative, and the narrative explains the particulars. The closed door is there to open. Something happened when it closed. Something else will happen when it opens or opens again.

Viewing these photographs is a shifting collaboration between the photographer, the subject and the viewer. An image of concrete physical objects, motionless and ordinary at first glance, becomes a dynamic description of the subject that is simultaneously objective and subjective, concrete and psychological, obvious and elusive.

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT © WALT WHITMAN ODETS 1965-2009