For centuries artists have devised new strategies for capturing the likeness of another and have sought to distill the essence of other individuals into a singular image, the portrait.  It started with patrons paying artists to create facsimiles of themselves for posterity, glorifying their idyllic self image.  In contemporary photography artists like Cindy Sherman aimed to uncover and present "personas"as an expression of the portrait, through herself as the subject.  And photographers like Robert Weingarten seek to present the portrait without ever presenting an image of the person at all.

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In this work, my aim is to present the portrait through a digital collage of photographic traces of the essence of the subject...their being, their character, their personas, their essence.  I set out to construct a visual architecture of discrete elements that when layered and combined using the full spectrum of digital editing techniques, expose new dimensions of understanding and new ways of viewing the subject.  Because they blur the lines of time and space in portraiture, they continue to reveal themselves in new ways the more you explore the pieces.  Perhaps a metaphoric expression of the human condition as our lives layer over time, building on our past.

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Chris Hauck, 2016