Ryan Mills

ARTIST STATMENT

It is my constant ambition to make images that live in a world above and beyond façade and vanity, that are, as much as possible, real and free of artifice. My process therefore is always a collaboration guided by what the models bring with them and how I respond and resonate to their individual truths. My choice of black and white film and the large format camera allows me to focus on the subject while stripping away needless distraction. This has everything to do with keeping the photographic process as simple as possible.

Work that spans time is understandably my chief focus. Photographing someone, anyone, just once is in fact unimaginable to me. Working with children is particularly inspiring because they live in such an honest moment. There is so rarely any question about who they are and how they are feeling. These innocent years are fleeting of course and that fact lends an important urgency to how I work. Sometimes I feel that if I blink what I have before me will vanish in an instant and be gone. Certainly working with the same young person a year later will be an almost entirely new experience. It goes without saying that this brief season is at once so short but so important as well. The geometry of each innocent life designs the larger architecture yet to come. My pictures are an attempt to scribe the meteoric moment, the sweet advance of this constant whirling motion. Soon enough, the photographs will become memory.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Juried Group Exhibition

Accolades & Press