Claire Dooley

Portrait Series

I am interested in the idea of documentation as art. In this project I have incorporated the process of documentation into a series of portraits. The dictionary definition of a portrait is “a representation or impression of someone or something”.

I wanted to create a series of portraits that challenges the perception of what it means to really know somebody. Can we say we know a person simply by knowing a lot about them? Can we ever know a person without them knowing us? As a starting point for this project I began interviewing people I know well- family, friends etc. I began by capturing every aspect of the interview, the audio and the video, and then I started stripping it back, to see how much information I could take away before a true sense of the person was lost.