Not long before her 15-year college reunion, the photographer Josephine Sittenfeld re-created old photographs of her former classmates.
In 2000, when the photographer Josephine Sittenfeld was a junior at Princeton University, she captured portraits of her classmates on medium-format film and, after exhibiting the prints on campus, she consigned them to a closet in her parents’ home. The series returned to Sittenfeld’s mind last spring, not long before her fifteen-year college reunion.
“Reunion,” the result of this labor, is a series of moody, satisfying diptychs that fast-forward the natural transformations featured in more gradual long-term portraiture projects, such as Nicholas Nixon’s of the Brown sisters. Before-and-after shots, much like class gatherings themselves, tend to promise drastic reinventions, but Sittenfeld’s deliver a visual consistency that feels both plain and profound.
As a student, Sittenfeld told me over the phone, she hewed to a belief that serious portraiture should eschew smiles, but her early subjects appear not to have needed much instruction. Most of the students—arms crossed, hair unkempt—eye the camera with a seemingly instinctive mix of indifference and suspicion, as though the shutter might somehow snatch their individuality or stall the movement of the moment.
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