All My Friends

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All My Friends

Photography by Mark Andrew

Most portraiture is purely about appearances and taking pretty pictures, and in this project I began with the desire to take portraiture to a much higher level. The idea behind the project started with capturing the personality of a few friends and soon I realized that I wanted the images to resonate beyond my friend’s personality and begin to engage with not only with subject, but with the viewer. Ultimately, these images began to resonate on a personal level in myself, and not only was I the photographer and artist but I had become subject to the images in a powerful way.

As I began my education as an artist during my last year in high school I was also beginning a transformation in faith. As my personal faith evolved I began more and more to understand that a significant part of who I see God to be is a lover of humans. I desired to reflect that in this project and to learn more deeply who my friends are as God sees them. In the pursuit of images that would begin to depict core reflections of my friends, I discovered my faith in action through these deep and meaningful discoveries of my friends. In the same line of learning, this project has also begun a transformation of my identity as an artist and photographer, and I began a vein of self-portraiture in this project to uncover that revelation through images.

A deeper origin of my art is my fascination with stories, which is deeply rooted in my being and comes from many more parts of my core self than I can begin to understand. My family has been deeply rooted in a story culture, all of us reading from a young age. Dr. Seuss, Orson Scott Card, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and many more have deeply rooted stories in my memory, so much that I remember more clearly many of the stories I read in my youth than anything else. This love of story has translated deeply into my image making, manifesting itself in my love of the dramatic, the depressing, the macabre, the fantastic, the joyful, the hopeful, and anything else I find beautiful in any way, whether it be unusual, corny, human, natural, unnatural, or whatever else strikes my fancy. I have been deeply influenced by artists such as Annie Leibovitz, Robert and Shana Parkeharrison, my peers and professors at Eastern Mennonite University, musicians such as the Goo Goo Dolls, Coldplay, Jars of Clay, and many more. This project is currently named after a song by LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends,” off of their Sounds of Silver LP, a song that has been particularly resonant with my work this semester.

As a student of image making and as an artist, I am in a constant state of learning, self-discovery, discovery of the world around me, and those in it. This project is not over, and as it continues in different manners and different aesthetics, I will continue my quest of discovering people, their stories and their lives.