Tara Polansky - Artist
Why that vacant lot?
2011
Digital print on archival paper
19 ½” x 29”
In earnestness I wonder, why the young couple who were to become my grandparents would pose for a photograph in an ugly vacant lot? Their silhouettes reveal my grandmother wearing heals and a nice dress and my grandfather also dressed up. In this “silhouette series” I am able to call attention to people’s postures, the way people stand together and the places they found themselves. All of these things are “clues” about the lives they led.

I have a group of pictures taken last year at a friend’s birthday party. One of my friends had just broken up with her boyfriend of ten years. She was a mess and spent much of the party crying but we thought it was better for her to be out crying with people who cared about her than at home alone. Looking at the pictures shot that night, how much of this story could an unknowing viewer glean? The devastated friend smiles with the rest of us, arms around her, and hers around us. All you could really tell is that we were all together in this location.