Bear Kirkpatrick

My portraits are an investigation of human visual response, a way to push against something and see what gets pushed back. The human eye struggles with blind spots, aberrations, and distortions—all of the awkward design flaws in the human visual system that the brain smoothes over by creating additional data to fill in the gaps and so create for us a seamless picture. I think all consciousness works this way—it gathers what it can, creates a 3D picture, and fills in missing gaps to create a seamless experience of the world. And though parts are added, there is also much that is lost or thrown away when it overlaps other information or when it doesn’t fit or conflicts with the dominant narrative. Those gaps and thrown away pieces--the never seen, but felt--are what interest me, and they are what I use a camera to find. They are the ghosts of presence and memory, the vestigial elements we carry about us as invisibly as spirits.