JOANN VERBURG: I had just moved from Boston to take the job as a visiting artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Minnesota seemed like an incredibly exotic place to me I was surrounded by new friends, and it made me a different person.
The picture is set up a little bit like a yearbook photograph or a set of school pictures in a row. I wanted to suggest that who you are is really also determined by who else is in your life. The other two people in the photograph were other visiting artists. This is the only photograph in this exhibition that describes what I look like.
I wanted to have body parts of each of the people who were not the central head in the frame included as a way of suggesting that we're influenced by all those things that aren't in the frame. The glove is supposed to suggest me. It was just an empty glove that was propped up for the photograph.
I took the lens cap off the camera, and waited for ten seconds, just counting ten, and popped a strobe during that time when the person's face changed from that self-conscious look to something that seemed more vital.
