The week before Halloween seems the right time to share an image that’s haunted me since I first saw it a few years ago. “Caroline” is a mixed media photograph created by my old friend Trish Rawlings, an artist and writer living in Baltimore. The photograph is taken from a series called Revenant, meaning “one who returns after death or a long absence.”
Besides, a little beauty on Monday morning helps enormously.
From Trish:
“The mixed-media assemblages shown here are from a series called Revenant, which had its genesis when, some months ago, I uncovered a group of portrait photographs and negatives I’d packed at the bottom of a trunk and forgotten about. While I studied and then began to work with the images, I was struck by how different the faces looked from how I remembered them; I felt I’d never seen them before.
Some bore an air of ghostly wistfulness, as though weakened by the years of confinement,while others appeared bewildered, lost, ironically, in the light. A few flaunted a defiant expression, as though proud to have survived both darkness and abandonment. You do what you must do, these seemed to say, against invisibility.
Impelled by an irrational guilt–feeling I’d committed an existential crime by consigning them to darkness and obscurity–I tried to return these sea-changed faces to how I remembered them. But no amount of darkroom tweaking had any effect; the haunting images had emerged from their exile as new beings.
When it came time to print, straightforward methods felt wanting. The added layers of time, memory, and longing begged a fresh approach. I hit on the idea of using a shallow shadow box and found materials to set off the faces and suggest complementary moods. While I worked, it felt as though someone–or something–were pressing me to bring about yet another incarnation for these faces from the past.”