The Absence of Passion

For every body of work that comes to fruition there is one that falters and fails. The Absence of Passion, a collection of portraits of Iraq completed in 2008, was borne out of one of these failures. I was struggling to create a series of imagery, wholly unrelated to the series that was to emerge, and could not escape the feeling of being confined. After many attempts I abandoned the series to address this sense of constraint, this absence of passion I was harboring toward the work. I tore up old bed sheets and wrapped them around my body, searching for an accurate expression of this impasse. I photographed myself for source material, wrapped up one way, then another, eventually focusing on the face. As the imagery emerged I noticed it paralleled the imagery I held of the Islamic world; a world of hidden faces. Since the onset of war in Iraq it was not difficult to imagine the loss and the suffering of the Iraqi community and the range of emotion that must prevail there, much of which is obscured to us by geographical and cultural distance. The wrappings in this context become bandages, hiding from us the impact, both physical and psychological, of the brutality of war. 

Carol Wax , mezzotint expert and author of Mezzotint: History and Technique writes that the images of The Absence of Passion are "very moving, powerful, and haunting works of art.  Exquisite."