Statement:

Close to Home: Photographs by Michael Alpert

I use a large-format view camera on a tripod to make photographs showing large and small buildings and other structures that I encounter here in Maine. As I travel along country roads and city streets, there are times when I feel that photographs find me. The stars align for a certain duration, and I am allowed to record that alignment on film. At those moments, and later as I more deliberatively review my negatives, I am often surprised by the implications of these everyday depictions.

My silver-gelatin prints are produced in a traditional manner and are usually small in scale. I want people to lean into these modest prints; to “read” them slowly; to become engaged with their subject matter, their aesthetic and symbolic values, their implied emotions, and their formal symmetries. These prints are not meant to “document” Maine in any traditional sense, in that they do not provide an historical overview or social commentary. The photographs are not intended to enhance or critique—or even define—what they depict. They are not meant to present “decisive moments” or representative scenes. They are emphatically meant to carry content that is both close to home and close to the bone.

Human beings are conscious organizing animals in a universe that actively dissociates itself from permanent organization. The conceptual nexus of my work can be found at the juncture between human enterprise and nature’s unrelenting effort to unravel what we do. That frail edge is as much a cognitive and spiritual reality as a material fact. Our collective experience is a sacred accomplishment—albeit perishable. By temperament, I am an anxious optimist and a self-consciously naive lover of life.