Pairs, from the series Millennium Pictures, 2022

The language of technological innovation is tinged with anxiety and awe. Its vision recasts us as beneficiaries of a more connected humanity—somehow both more human and more than human—yet its promise often feels suspect. In a review of William A. Ewing’s 2004 exhibition About Face, which proclaimed the death of the photographic portrait, Vince Aletti writes in the pages of Aperture’s Winter 2004 issue: “Even before photography’s documentary credibility was deliberately and irrevocably eroded from within, pictures of our fellow humans had been stripped of virtually all pretense to revelation, insight, or any but the most superficial emotional content.” This skepticism frames Hannah Whitaker’s silhouetted portraits and still lifes, which address an unease, pervasive in the twenty-first century, about how technology relates to our humanity. Seemingly familiar human figures are obscured and manipulated into dark, synthetic forms. “I wanted to make photographs that center around a particular face, without actually depicting it,” Whitaker states. Using mirrors, long exposures, reflective materials, special lighting, and anthropomorphized arrangements, her work treats technology as a medium as well as an aesthetic position. Many images employ digital interventions to conceal, dislocate, or duplicate human appendages, a response to technology’s tendency to fragment our everyday experiences and evacuate meaning in the service of data. In their stark contrasts, these “portraits” carry a menacing subtext within their outlines and an all-too-human trepidation in the face of disorienting change—a feeling as relevant today as it was decades ago. This special limited-edition print is from a series of works commissioned for Aperture magazine #248: “The 70th Anniversary Issue”.

Pigment Print
Paper Size: 20 x 24 inches
Edition of 10
Signed and numbered by the artist