13th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest Altered Images
Blueprint Two - Amy

I was recently reading Diane Arbus’s biography. In it, the author quotes Arbus from her own biography where she confesses “the contents of somebody’s bathroom is like reading their biography.” Blueprints gravitates around that same notion: I believe that our homes are a reflection of ourselves. Instead of conventionally photographing my subjects, I opted for revealing their personalities by depicting their objects, which are then placed within the floorplan of the subject’s apartment. Like a character in a novel, my subjects are characters in their respective biographies that I wrote with my camera in a single page. The choice of a specific object is my way of highlighting aspects of my character’s life as I please. I photograph only a representation of each object, not the object itself because often, when we expose ourselves to the world, we are not sharp and translucent; we are rather imprecise and hard to read. Finally, I make reference to reproductions of technical drawings introduced in the 19th. Initially, the Blueprints could resemble architectural collages. However, they are a reflection of each person therein portrayed, a negative of the original.

Photo Detail
Date Taken: 04.2015
Date Uploaded: 11.2015
Photo Location: New York, New York, United States of America
Copyright: © Joana P. Cardozo