WALTER PORTZ ARTIST RECEPTION

Artist statement.

For twenty-five years, I was a photographer. Not someone who made photographs.

A photographer. There is a difference.

In my hometown, a city of a quarter million people, that became my identity. I built a career making portraits. I carried cameras into thousands of rooms. I photographed people falling in love, growing older, having children, building families. Intense portraits. Creative commercial concepts. Presidents and immigrants and technology.

The camera was always there.

Eventually it became difficult to tell where I ended and it began. In 2014 I made a portrait of a friend. I removed his head. In its place I put a camera.

At the time I thought I was making an interesting image. I don't think I understood that I was making a self-portrait.

Ten years later, I keep returning to it.

Cameras for heads.
Lenses covering eyes.
Wires.
Monitors.
Machines entering bodies. Bodies disappearing into machines. The apparatus becoming the person. The person becoming the apparatus.

I spent twenty-five years looking through a piece of glass and being identified by what I carried in my hands. For most of my adult life, I documented other people's lives.

Now I am trying to understand my own.

The camera is still there. I am just no longer standing behind it.