Richard Peterson

Much of contemporary art measures its ambition by its distance from the visible. Abstraction, invention, the construction of other worlds. I understand that impulse, but my work starts from the opposite conviction.

Leaving reality is no longer the difficult gesture. We do it all day, with very little effort. What has become difficult is staying with what is in front of us long enough to actually feel it.

I photograph people because that is where the difficulty is greatest. We see more human faces than any generation before us, and we recognise less of what they carry. It is all there, in public, every day, and almost none of it reaches us.

My question is not what a person looks like. It is whether an image can make that person present again, without explaining them and without reducing them to a shape. The body shows and hides at the same time. I work at that threshold, where someone becomes visible without becoming known.

I don't consider the real a lesser material because I did not invent it. To find in it something true enough that another person recognises themselves is, to me, the harder act of creation.