Roxanne Fogel
Roxanne with her best friend Bob
I learn by watching people; by letting them teach me through their stories. When people tell stories they use their voices, some with raspy growls and others nasally wines, as well as their body language and eyes. By observing all of these forms of communication, I have learned how to read people, an important ability for my creative practice. Being able to read a person is more than foreseeing what they are thinking and feeling, it is also about communicating with them. As a portrait photographer, I believe that every portrait I create should be an intimate glimpse into the life and character of the person I am photographing. In order to that, I have learned how to communicate with people through watching them tell their stories, by embracing how they bring their stories to life, and relating to their stories in any way I can.
A lesson I have taught myself, is that the majority of my life as an artist will be lived gathering knowledge about my creative practice. I learned that lesson through the experiences of my creative practice. There have been times when I met with a person to photograph them, but ended up not photographing them at all. Instead, we sat and talked, or rather they talked and I listened. The fact that I did not take a single photo during those times does not matter, because they taught me more than the act of taking a photo. People in my life have named me a story teller, but I like to think of myself as a story listener. I believe that I have to know how to listen to a story to tell one.
On more than one occasion, someone has asked me where a person in one of my portraits is from; they can’t help but wonder where they have seen them before. More often than not, they are mistaken by their feeling that they have met the person before, but sometimes they have. I once photographed a friend covered in black concrete dye, and hung his portrait in a show he was able to attend. As we stood in the gallery together, a woman walked over to us and asked who the man covered in black was. I laughed, and then pointed at my friend. The woman laughed as well, with disbelief. The portrait I created of him reflected more than his physicality, it reflected his soul, and that is all I ever hope for when I create a portrait.
The intimate connections between me and those I photograph are the connections I want those who view my work to feel. I want to remind people how disconnected the people in our world have become from one another, a world replacing bank tellers with ATMs, and in-person conversations with text messaging. People pass one another without a glance, as though a person is as common as an abandoned piece of trash on the street. If someone can look at my work and feel compelled to connect with just one person afterwards, then there are at least two more people in the world who may not feel so lonely.
