I started making these as a way to play with the authorship of a photographic portrait. The power-play between the photographer, camera and subject became a performance in which the subject could try to influence the camera and I could try to influence the subject. I was interested in the camera’s role of providing an insight within that dynamic, so I used a Polaroid aura camera developed by an American inventor in an attempt to record what a psychic might see. Electromagnetic sensors connect the subject to the camera which translates these readings into information about them. This is depicted as color in the Polaroid and printed by the camera as a description.

I’ve made portraits with people who are familiar to me, my family, friends, artists, musicians, familiar faces.

This work is in multiple museum collections, has been exhibited widely and has been published as a book by Damiani.

About Carlo Van de Roer

Carlo Van de Roer is an artist from New Zealand, living and working in New York. His work has been exhibited at venues such as M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; Suite Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee; Hyères Photography Festival; the Paris Photo Prize; and the MUSAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Léon, Spain.

FURTHER READING

• View on OpenSea
• Artist's Website
• The Portrait Machine Project
• Meet Carlo Van de Roer, Experimental photographer and light magician (video)