Take Me With You is a project which began as studio portraits of my queer friends and community in 2016 Sacramento, CA. It evolved into an installation of Victorian style cased images (shown at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT.) The third incarnation of Take Me With You appeared as a selection of the original portraits alongside found images from a 1960s slide index and my personal collection of found photographs, displayed at Pinhole Coffee in San Francisco.
Take Me With You installation with pedestals, silicon lightbulbs and cased images at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Winter 2017. Cased images: cases commissioned from Modern Day Antique, prints made on aluminum, and copper frames original to the era (approx. 1860-1890.)
Cased images were treasured objects. Their small size allowed them to be held in hand, carried in pockets, or displayed within the home. Often, the protective cases were lined in rich red, green, or blue velvet with a brass inlayed frame. Popular during the Civil War, families had portraits made of their sons or husbands. For many, these images would be the first and last taken of their loved one. With the invention of the tintype, portraiture became more accessible to working and lower class individuals, capturing characters living in a pre-industrial United States. This was before the invention of Kodak’s Brownie camera and the introduction of the snapshot into the cultural vernacular. To me, this early way of keeping a portrait communicates care for both the individual represented in the image as well as a statement about the preciousness of the photograph itself- a very different aesthetic from contemporary times of digital photography and media. These days our image is a dime a dozen, easy to take, share, and delete. Most images exist digitally, never to be printed. Will they last? Are they special?
Placing modern subjects in these historically specific frames asks the viewer consider how these particular subjects would not have been housed in that frame over one hundred years ago. In three cases, the portrait is partnered with a view of either the Sacramento or American River. My goal was to convey the worth of each person shown- our lives are meaningful, worth documenting, and worth protecting. These individuals claim space within these frames as a symbolic correspondence with the past. It is a gesture towards shaping our present and future by forging alternative histories.
Thank you to all of those who came to my apartment studio in the sweaty heat of Sacramento summer, to avid Sacramento photographer Mark Reese for the slide collection, and Rick Levy for helping me document the cased images.