Charles Hagen
statement
home
My wife and daughter appear frequently in my photographs, but I do not regard these pictures as family photographs or portraits, and certainly not as documents of a particular time or social situation. Instead I regard my subjects as actresses (a more accurate term than models) and work with them in visually suggestive settings to discover expressive gestures, creating a kind of symbolic theater. For example, the blurred figure of a child emerging from a tangle of bare branches may suggest breaking through entanglements, real and psychological; another figure, neck deep in dark water, floats above multiple reflections of her own face, as if personalities are washing away.
I use medium- and large-format cameras to increase the monumentality of the images, and often light scenes with flash, held away from the camera, to heighten drama. I try to break habits of seeing, shooting closeup or from unusual angles, using focus, blur, multiple prints, and other aspects of the language of photography, to push the emotional resonance of the scenes further.
These images are often posed, or at least repeated after an expression or juxtaposition is noted. Increasingly I work with large-format cameras, not only for the more detailed negatives they provide, but also for the sense of ceremony they impose on the act of photographing. I present the pictures as large prints--30x40 inches or larger--and favor lush, intoxicating colors, to emphasize the pictorial allure of the photographs and their illusionism.
