Don Anderson 1992

Don Anderson: text for a publication by the Southern Arts Federation

Photographs are made of light and time.  If light may be regarded as both particle and wave, time in photographs may be seen as both an instant and eternity, as past, present, and future condensed into an evanescent image.

Don Anderson ressurects, reconstructs, wrestles with, and reflects upon time.  His pictures reveal a Proustian fascination with memory, with talismans of recollection and self-recognition.  Anderson’s images are fabricated from layers of personal artifacts and accumulated insights;  they appear before the viewer like the mutable dramas of dreams in which figures multiply and merge, where everything is deeply familiar and nothing is quite as it appears to be.

In Louisville, Kentucky, Anderson asks the same questions that Gaugin posed in his exotic paradise: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”  He probes for answers in the plain and steady gazes of family portraits, in those small personal pictures we typically tuck into wallets, keep in plump albums, and prop on tables and dressers.  He investigates with love and anger and passionate curiosity those pieces of lifetimes we are always leaving behind in photographs.

Anderson cannot now photograph his parents, certainly he could never photograph them in their youth, nor as the mother and father he knew when he was a child.  Nor could he photograph himself as that child or as a puzzled young man first coming to terms with his own mortality, full of innocence and with the terrible rush of time coursing through his veins.

Among the things he can and does photograph, however, are old pictures, silver-on-paper faces from long forgotten portrait studios and family snapshots.  Anderson has copied those portraits, multiplied and collaged them, printed them on acetate so we can see through them to other versions of themselves, to different but related pictures, to fragments of old wallpaper that marvelously evoke the rooms in which those former lives were spent.  He has used them as points of departure from which to make intrepid forays into the dark, glimmering groves of memory, to set forth on a perilous odyssey of autobiography.

We discover who we are – if we ever manage to do so at all – through telling stories, and all our stories, it seems, well forth from indelible, inscrutable, incredible childhood, that flashing moment in which we are filled with more wonder and fear and delight than we can possibly comprehend in a lifetime.  When we glance in a mirror we often see our parents’ faces and our forgotten selves glance back at us.

Don Anderson has employed photography to seize and contemplate such fleeting glances.  His recurrent motifs and their variations, the faces seen again and again, always changing and revealing something new, are like rosaries or mantras; they reinforce the intensity of his seeking among those few fragile clues that seem so dense with meaning yet which are so reluctant to relinquish clear answers.  He invests his images with potent energy and transforms them with the legerdemain of an accomplished craftsman.  He has created rich, visual poems and songs, personal sagas and intimate narratives from the profound, eloquent, and acutely poignant silence of his materials.  He has, in brief, made wonderfully insightful pictures, steeped in time and redolent with feeling.

Sean Wilkinson
February 1992