Michael Rudd

Michael Rudd was born in Canada and lived in Hong Kong and London before settling in New York. He’s self-taught and hasn’t shown much of anything anywhere. Today we share his series titled Wear My Hat.

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Wear My Hat

“The following photo series is a failure. Let me explain: It was a tough time in my life, a relationship was ending. I wanted to force myself out into the world. Photography was transpiration: sunlight evaporates water on the leaf, pulling fluid upwards and outwards in a jeweled string from the subterranean. Out there moments were evaporating, pulling me into the world. At least that was my excuse. I wanted to empathize with people, to acknowledge what I couldn’t know. But I placed unwitting narratives onto them. Wear my hat! I never asked questions, photographs served as answers. What a joke!”

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“During a personally difficult period, I used photography to get out of the house to interact and connect with strangers. Over a number of weekends in late 2013, I took my camera to different New York boroughs, snapping away at all I encountered. Returning home, viewing the photos, editing and rearranging, I began to feel a creeping unease, which, weekend after weekend, grew into alienation. Photography is an acknowledgement of the visible. More aggressively it’s a denial of circumstance. Cleaved from context, people were flattened to images. Initially empathetic, these weekend trips became something more pernicious. I stopped taking pictures of strangers.”

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To view more of Michael’s work, please visit his website.