Portraits Found & Taken

Portraits Found & Taken, writes Tim McLaughlin, began with a collection: "I have collected found photos for years: snaps, postcards, studio portfolios, and entire albums. In a sense taking a photograph is very similar to finding one. They both involve a close relationship with the subject that is almost too intimate . . . The found photographs, the character descriptions, and the portraits each come, I think, from the same place. They arrive from a belief that the human face is at once a story and a surface: easily read but difficult to interpret. The art of the photographer and the art of the writer are adventures in which we work to assemble, edit, and deliver our fictions to the world." -- From the work's preface