It's all True
All the works in this series were taken on the evening of 31st October 1993 on the streets and in bars around the Castro, San Francisco. I used a simple on-camera flash to capture the participants taking part in the Halloween celebrations. These photographs were then printed at various times over the past 19 years. The 90’s styles date the pictures as does the sepia toning and degradation of the paper created by heavy bleaching, and staining. I chose to incorporate visual reminders of the means of production within the final prints, revealing sprocket holes, negative frames and objects used to hold down the paper as a way of acknowledging the working process of the analogue printing.
The subject’s themselves play up to the camera hidden beneath masks, makeup and costumes; they appear as caricatures. I am interested in blurring this idea of surface verses character and have experimented with solarisation and double exposures to highlight this sense of the unreal. Later, sometimes months after printing I use bleach to remove flaws in the highlights and to strip back the darker areas to reveal ghostlike figures in the background.
The title references the “Orson Wells Lost Classic”, It’s All True”. The film examines the broad diversity of American life and was playing at the Castro Theatre that evening.