Act Your Age
When age stops looking the way we expect, the photograph catches us deciding what the difference means.
Act Your Age takes its title from a familiar command. It assumes that age should be legible: that appearance, behavior and desire should line up in ways we recognize. I photograph moments when that order breaks down, and the gap between what someone is doing and what we think they should be doing becomes difficult to ignore.
A stroller can look like care or indulgence. A costume can look like freedom or refusal. The photograph sharpens these contradictions, then withholds the explanation that would settle them. Faced with that gap, the viewer has to make it mean something.
I am drawn to scenes that provoke a response I cannot always articulate. Some make me laugh; others make me cringe, hesitate or look again. But looking does not travel in only one direction: the picture catches the viewer in the act of deciding what it means. These photographs do not tell us what to think. They make it difficult to pretend that we are not already thinking it.
