Last Portraits

Works from the Last Portraits series were made using Scotch tape as a transfer medium to produce chronological sequences of the portraits printed in the obituary section of the New York Times. This is a technique I developed for 30 Drawings, produced earlier the same year. The ghostly images are just fragments of newsprint and traces of ink adhered to fragile sheets of glass that repeat in a set of standard photo-portrait sizes. The number of portraits in each piece was determined by a length of time and the number of photographs published — a day, week, or month, with the largest piece in the series being a sequence of eight months duration.