"The Outwin 2016" Finalist: Evan Baden

Out of over 2,500 entries in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, 43 artists have their work shown in the exhibition “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today.” Read more about one of the finalists, Evan Baden. 

What about this sitter inspired you?

I almost exclusively photograph teenagers. What inspires me about that age is the transitory nature of their identity.  It is a time in a person’s life that they are trying to figure out who they are, and to do that, they end up testing out a number of different identities. One week they fit in with one clique, and the next they may be on to something new. Because of that transitory identity, they can usually step into any role I ask them to.

How did the sitter inspire this specific portrait?

For Florence and Daniel, their pose was what had originally inspired the portrait.  I had known that I had wanted an image similar to what we ended up producing, but in my head it had always been with a teenage boy and girl. However, while driving through the suburbs or Portland, OR, I drove by these two standing at a bus stop. They were holding each other in a pose similar to the image. I didn’t have the nerve to approach them, and was disappointed that I missed the opportunity.  A week later, I drove by the same bus stop and they were standing there once again. I approached them this time and asked to come and photograph them. After the individual portraits I made, I asked if they’d be willing to pose together, and we made this image in their bedroom.

What made you decide to depict this sitter as you did?

For Angela, when initially discussing what we could do for an image with her, she had mentioned that she had swim practice in the early mornings.  This was completely underwhelming to me, as I had envisioned an indoor pool, with terrible lighting and very little space for me to work. I decided to do the image regardless, believing that it would probably be a throw-away image, but would be useful in developing a relationship with Angela that would lead to future, more successful images. When I arrived at the pool around 6 a.m., it was extremely foggy, and to my delight, the pool was outside. This was November, and having grown up in Minnesota, the thought of outdoor swimming practice in November had never occurred to me. Because the pool was heated, steam was rising from the water. The scene was so alluring that I decided to make Angela a much smaller part of the image that originally envisioned, and to let the environment play a larger role in the image.

How did you work develop an idea from execution?

My work always develops from an initial kernel of images in my mind. I focus on something broad that is of interest to me, and try and figure a way to convey the broad strokes to a viewer. I have images planned in my head that will hopefully relate and fit in to those broad ideas. For this current project, I also tried to react to the sitters.  I met with each sitter several times, and beginning with a simple portrait, we talked about activities they participated in outside of an academic setting. We used those activities, hobbies, and events to form images I hadn’t originally thought of. While my images are always staged, this allowed elements of real events or details to enter the images. For instance, Florence and Daniel really were a couple, Angela really was supposed to be at swim practice that morning, and the girls on the cheer team had just finished cheering on the basketball team.

I go about  photographing  any  scene with  a medium-format digital  back mounted  on  a 4x5 view camera  via  a  stitching  back, which  allows  for  multiple  sections  of  the  4x5  picture  space to  be photographed.  This means that none of the images ever truly existed as depicted. Those sections are recomposed in Photoshop to make the semblance of a moment.

How does the piece fit within your larger body of work?

Each image included in The High School Yearbook Project represents a moment in the lives of a group of teens all attending the same high school. The images in the Yearbook are loosely organized into chapters. Florence and Daniel falls into the ‘Afterschool’ chapter, which represents the time between when school lets out and when parents arrive home from work. This time is an oddly private and autonomous time in the lives of these kids, as they are free to act as they choose. The image Florence and Daniel represents how these two choose to spend that time.

You can see Baden’s work in “The Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today,” up now through Jan. 8, 2017. Also, be sure to vote in our People’s Choice Competition.