Erin Spencer: Opening a Window to Herself,
first appeared on the Benham Gallery website in Seattle, Washington, January 29, 2002
“I’m a mostly shy person, and I don’t feel very comfortable in front of the camera when others are taking the picture. But in front of my own lens, I feel empowered. I never really know what I’ll see until the picture is printed, and yet I know that I’ve captured some part of myself that I need to see again.”
In her earliest experiments with a camera, photographer Erin Spencer shot “a great deal of everything,” looking for a theme and an idea that she could pursue more deeply. Much to her own surprise, she found that the work that received the most feedback from viewers were her self-portraits, wherein this shy, quiet, and often soft-spoken woman was found to be revealing intimate perspectives of herself.
At the Benham gallery in downtown Seattle, Spencer has a little alcove all her own, a room-within-a-room, where sixteen of her “self-portraits” hang on the walls. Only a few are self-portraits in the way we have come to expect, with the artist looking dead on at the camera. The rest involve explorations in time, geography, framing, exposure, and printing techniques. If photography is Spencer’s medium, then self-portraiture is her ever-evolving theme, but her pictures are as much about what isn’t seen in her as what is revealed by the camera lens.
“As a person, I’m not especially good at dealing with conflict, and it’s difficult for me to talk about myself. Self-portraits are a way for me to reveal, express, and then deal with my emotions.”
In choosing to make herself the primary subject within her photographs, Spencer narrows the focus of her eye down to a single point that is always available to her, any time and any place that she happens to be. The result is an exploration of body parts, clothing styles, lines, framing, printing, and most of all, the moods and the emotions she happens to find herself dealing with when the impulse to make a picture arrives.
By her nature, Spencer isn’t the sort of person who revels in the limelight or seeks to be the center of attention. Rather than using her work as a means to court a certain kind of narcissism, Spencer views showing her work as a revealing exposure of what she is working on photographically and internally to an audience that often sees a lot more in her work than she might be intending.
“People see a lot of themselves in my work, and approach me with comments that they think are about analyzing me,” she said. “They’ll say things like, ‘I know you must have had a rotten childhood,’ or they’ll ask me if I’m suicidal or emotionally disturbed. And it makes me wonder what they have experienced in their lives to feel that way when they see my work, because it would seem that I am opening a window to their lives rather than my own.”
While the prints on the walls captures her emotions and mood in time and space forever, it is the printing process which provides her with the greatest satisfaction. In the darkroom, Spencer relives the emotions that occurred when her pictures were shot, then finds a kind of cathartic release of emotion that she doesn’t experience elsewhere, rendering the process of image acquisition and printing as a kind of self-analysis with the picture as but a memory of what has been seen and revealed.
“If there really is some kind of disturbance within me, it only appears in the time when I take the picture. But in the darkroom, watching the picture come to light, I recall when the picture was taken and the feeling is relived – and then released. By the time the picture is on the wall, I’ve moved through whatever I might have been feeling at the time. In a sense, both shooting and printing offer me a process of empowerment. And what remains is just an artifact of what I have experienced in that process.”
