hands: ‘from my hands to yours’

Some hands beg to be held. 

They reach out and grasp you without even realising. 

I love those hands, the ones that wear their hearts on their sleeves. 

The ones that hide behind matted sleeves, palms balled up in unease. 

Or there’s the hands that hold themselves with so much confidence that anything they did would be right. 

I can’t help but empathise with the nervous fingers that pick at their nails or fiddle with jewellery. 

I admire the hands with vulnerability, a real expression of confidence. 

The hands that invite others in to share their warmth.

Oh to soak up the sun like palms facing the sky, to praise the sweet feeling of warm sunlight.

This book is a documentation of hands, as a mode of portraiture. Documentary portraiture or environmental portraiture is a common photographic technique used in capturing a person in their own space or to represent their personality or story. I took this idea and used it in the documentation process of photographing the hands I see regularly. These are could people in my class, my parents, and my closest friends or simply just people I know. It is important for me as an emotive artist to capture not just the way that the hands are perceived visually, but how they feel or touch, being the centre of tactility. This has resulted in some very visceral photographs and some very observational photographs. 

The narrative structure of my book is very loose - it is lyrical in the sense that the photographs bring the theme themselves, clearly identifying what the book is about. The accompanying text is poetic and helps to create a sensory experience in reading the book. Immersing the reader into a particular observation perspective in order to encounter the photographs. 

The Materiality of my book is incredibly important and considered as I wanted the viewer to have quite a tactile experience in reading and interacting with the images. For this reason, I looked into lightweight paper types and eventually chose to work with Butter Paper as it gave a lovely tone to my photographs and had a very tactile texture and sound when turning the pages. As the Butter Paper is relatively see-through, I needed to back it with another paper type to strengthen the readability of the image. 

The text in my book is a short poetic description of the hands inside the book. This text was written with the intention to bring the reader into a thoughtful and attentive head-space in order to then look at the photographs with emotive consideration. There are no descriptions of the images and the names are purposefully left out. This is to seperate the viewer with the familiarity of knowing and recognising the hands as a lot of them are also students at Massey, instead I want my audience to wonder what sort of person the hands belong to. Are they an artist, or a mechanic? Are they a mother, or a lover?

I intend to invite the reader in to witness an experience of touch. In physically turning the pages and touching the Butter Paper the reader can experience the tactility of the book. In holding their own hand over the hands in my photographs they can see the details in the hands. Some of the images are more visceral than others, some are soft and fluidic as to symbolise the emotive and tactile feelings that arise when I think of that persons hands. After all, this book is my own visualisation of how I see the hands around me. I encourage the reader to then go out into their own environment and notice the hands that rise in their own life. 

2020.