Chris Kienke: Selected Works

Overview

Chris Kienke has been working on a series of portraits for three years now. The people that he photographs are all people he knows. This gives a personal (uneven) insight to the work at the same time allowing spontaneous (instant) capture of human expression'i The counter-intuited "expression" is indexed as a Gestalt with the photographer, one to one. This ongoing series of portraits arose from a need to document the people in his environment. Kienke wanted to avoid creating anything contrived or pre-conceived, awlt at the same time called this need into question, and the authenticity of attempting t(l capture 'honest' reflections of these people. Each subject chose the outfit they would wear and any objects that would be used as props. The photographer's relationship with the subjects varied from person to person, what mattered was that they were a part of the "relational" overview of a determination of the shared environment and therefor.a a part of the process of self-determination. As the series grows and as the photographer grows aware of the limitations of the archive, so too the attitude, or point of view of th~ model and its observer. As an individual the photographer begins to see the work as a comment on the definition of identity as a non-visual judgement. What is interesting in these physiognomies? How do we as a society create that kind of definition and "type" other than in the image, the "realist illusion", from mundane, repetitive, and often prejudiced vision? Kienke's people are asked to question the assumptions they create about their identity, for the camera, staged as objects of scrutiny. And almost instantaneously, we register their returning gaze as precisely about another person, the: spectator's non-appearance, who stands outside the frame, outside the "punctum"; that we are being judged absolutely on a loss of privileged positions.

PL