Image Essay by Hadley Langosy
Artist’s Statement: Aligning Realities
How to capture the world after being raised on Fellini films? How to compete with my photographic heroes—Jan Saudek, Francesca Woodman, Eugenio Recuenco? These questions haunt my every moment as a photographer.
You must understand: I have almost no interest in documentary photography that looks like documentary photography. I am drawn to the surreal, to anything that’s a step beyond the prosaic reality I’m immersed in. I don’t care about what I can see. I care about capturing the way I see the world, especially the people in my world.
Have you ever noticed that the photo you take of your mother looks different from the almost identical pose your father snaps? He’s photographing the lover he’s chosen to share his life with; you’re photographing the woman who scares your night terrors away. She is beautiful, extraordinary, unique to each of you. And those unique perceptions show in the images we create of people we love.
I fought against taking snapshots for the first ten years of my adult life. In my early twenties, I burned through eight rolls of film on a trip through Scotland, but very few people were in them, and none could be called family vacation photos. My favorite shot is of my husband and father-in-law standing on the Isle of Skye, the wind almost blowing them off the edge of the earth.
Then I had children.
When Arwyn and Gideon take pictures of me, their photographs are unlike anything by anyone else. Their images may be skewed, taken from below, oddly framed; I may be pulling faces. But in my kids’ photos, I look like some sort of fairy creature.
When I photograph them, I attempt to trap the lightning-bolt speed at which they seem to grow and change before my eyes.
While my fine art photographs take dozens of hours to produce—sewing costumes, staging worlds, creating characters, printing using the sun, hand coloring final prints—my family photos often are done in a flash and by instinct. Yet, my impulses as an art photographer have also begun to shape my snapshots of family and friends.
Now I hope viewers will catch a glimpse of that fleeting moment in which the sun shifts slightly and my people appear to glow from within—when the reality I see in my head aligns with the world before me.
Hadley Langosy is the production editor for Talking Writing. (Her night-terror-defying mother is Elizabeth Langosy, TW's executive editor.) Hadley took this photo of herself with Gideon and Arwyn.
She reports that last year she “stumbled upon” the smartphone app Instagram:
“Instagram is an interesting place. You have the serious fine art photographer beside the person obsessed with photographing his lunch each day next to the teenager who just picked up her first camera. Instagram became my vehicle for sharing the images I didn't quite know what to do with.”
