An excerpt of portraits made during Are you really my friend?
From the beginning Hollander knew she would set up traditional sittings with a Hasselblad medium format film camera and document using her point and shoot and iPhone, bouncing back and forth between analogue and digital, and our online and offline lives. Shooting on film with only available light is deliberate. She travelled lightly and unobtrusively, with just a camera and tripod, and no assistants to “produce” the portraits. She embraces the imperfections of film and natural light; sometimes the images are perfectly crisp, other times children blur with motion. Much like real life, some images are drenched in sunlight while others are barely lit by a single ceiling fan on a gloomy day. The demographics and surroundings of her subjects have range; from Chris and Louise Dingwall, Portland, Maine – a single father and his daughter under a makeshift couch fort; and Minh Truong-George, Jonas, Leon, Shanti + (Anya) George, Auckland who sit around the family table upright all facing the camera, slightly uncomfortable; to James Pettingill, Hinsdale, New Hampshire, a single man sitting in an ornate room, the patterned wallpaper and four poster bed counterbalancing his long hair and guitar.
-Denise Markonish, Curator MASS MoCA