Jens F.

"The Jens pictures began as an experiment. To photograph a young boy in many of the positions that Andrew Wyeth painted the model Helga; to give someone another identity and photograph them through the transformation. Working exclusively in a small town in Germany, I was also interested in the impulse of Americans like Henry James, to travel to Europe in search of a certain "privileged" landscape only in fact to insert an American inflection. The work evolved into a kind of dance between the two models, between painting and photography, between the exacting detail of photography and all the nuances of sketches and drawings. As a way of keeping track of all these images, I began to clip out the contact prints I liked and to paste them into a book. The volume became something like a log or sketchbook, the antithesis of photography where the viewer sees only the finished and perfected photograph. Here they see hundreds of attempts. Each page compiles years' worth of shots, the same picture taken again and again over time. The camera formats change; the boy's body changes; the light changes. Levels of intimacy change. The boy's sister is added as a substitute for Helga's daughter. The boy grows further away from the soft curves of femininity yet closer in his comfort and collaboration." - Collier Schorr.