TANJA HOLL ANDER are you really my friend?
Finding Friendship by denise markonish On New Year’s Eve 2010, Tanja Hollander was in her kitchen in Auburn, Maine, simultaneously writing to two friends: to one deployed in Afghanistan she wrote with pencil on paper; to the other working in Jakarta she sent a Facebook message. In this moment, between the tangible and digital, Hollander decided to photograph all 626 of her Facebook friends in real life. The journey began in Washington, DC, in March 2011 and ended in Tel Aviv, Israel, on June 4, 2016. During this time, Hollander immersed herself in the lives and communities of both close friends and virtual strangers, all the while sating her curiosity about the differences between the analogue and digital lives we lead. The statistics surrounding this project are staggering: 626 Facebook friends 430 portraits 72 new friends added 424 homes visited 260 zip codes, 180 cities/towns, and 34 states traveled 12 countries visited 102,000 digital video and image files created 5,000 Post-it notes collected 203,207 miles traveled, just 35,000 shy of reaching the moon However, there is more behind the data—there are the old friends and new; near strangers who welcomed Hollander into their homes; floods in Texas; and terrorist attacks in Paris, France. What started as a personal documentary on friendship and environmental portraiture turned into an exploration of contemporary culture, relationships, generosity and compassion, family structure,
community-building, storytelling and meal-sharing, economy and class, the relationship between technology and travel, social networking, memory, and the history of portraiture. Are you really my friend? features 430 portraits,i photographs of landscapes Hollander visited, snapshots and videos of what she experienced along the way, images of travel ephemera, a short documentary, and an interactive Post-it note project. It was important for Hollander that viewers understand her entire experience—a condition of the social media age—so, unlike historic photography projects, there is minimal editing. This is also a defiant stand against the art world, showing that a careful selection of portraits is perhaps no more important than an iPhone snapshot or scanned boarding pass. To emphasize this, Hollander printed all the portraits as wallpaper and then mounted some like traditional photographs. Additionally, there are six banners that contain a total of 5,148 images of ephemera, digital snapshots, selfies, and Post-it notes; and a memorial wall to those who have passed away since the project began. And lastly, we are able to wade through the hours of videos Hollander shot and see the large databases of information created around the project. From the beginning Hollander knew she would set up traditional sittings with a Hasselblad medium format film camera, but would also document using her point and shoot and iPhone, bouncing back and forth between analogue and digital, and our on-line and off-line lives. Shooting on film with only available light is deliberate. She travelled lightly and unobtrusively, with just a camera and tripod, and no assistants to “produce” the portraits. She embraces the imperfections
i While Hollander contacted all 626 friends, 67 did not respond, 53 didn’t schedule to meet , 21 said no, 14 were businesses, 13 either unfriended her or she them, 5 cancelled, and 2 were no-shows.
of film and natural light; sometimes the images are perfectly crisp, and other times children blur with motion. Much like real life, some images are drenched in sunlight while others are barely lit by a single ceiling-fan light bulb on a gloomy day. The demographics and surroundings of her subjects have range; from Chris and Louise Dingwall, Portland, Maine—a single father and his daughter under a makeshift couch fort; and Minh Truong-George, Jonas, Leon, Shanti + (Anya) George, Auckland who sit around the family table upright all facing the camera, slightly uncomfortable; to
James Pettengill, Hinsdale, New Hampshire, 2014 Archival pigment print
James Pettingill, Hinsdale, New Hampshire, a single man sitting in an ornate room, the patterned wallpaper and four-poster bed counterbalancing his long hair and guitar. Similarly, Hollander’s landscapes range from minimalist, such as Untitled (Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah), a nearly all-white vista captured with her Hasselblad camera, to casual, such as the hundreds of depictions of Hollander’s “Morning coffee spot”—iPhone snaps of a daily ritual. Likewise, Hollander scanned each piece
colored backdrops, equalizing the beautifully strange marks of TSA agents on boarding passes or the homemade business cards/receipts from cabbies. There are itineraries, currency, a broken sea urchin, and a whiskey bottle. No image, no object, no experience is taken for granted, an ethos that filtered into the making of this project. Hollander crowdfunded the making of this work. For her last fundraiser, “Act Fast Friday,” she gave away prints, people donated to the project whatever they could afford, and, as a result, Hollander democratizes the art-buying process. Also, she polls her audience, inviting them, with pencil on Post-it notes, to tell her what a real friend is (a nod to Hollander’s 2010 letter that started the project). “A real friend immediately deletes your hard drive when you die.” reads one. Another states: “A real friend knows when you take your birth control! (1:35 pm).” At MASS MoCA you can both read and contribute new notes, as a real-life message board grows over the course of the exhibition. One striking moment in the show comes via Hollander’s self-portraits. Both the informal selfies that act as a diary, grounding Hollander in place and time, but also the staged images of Hollander and companions such as Self Portrait with Karin and Barry, Auburn, Maine and Self Portrait with Sarah Khartry + Jeff Sharlet, Paris France. The first is a moment of comfort, friends gathered around Hollander’s kitchen table, while in the second the subjects look scared and defiant. This latter image was taken in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, where Hollander and journalist Jeff Sharlet happened to be reporting on social media and friendship. They write: “We've been working together on a project about pictures and words and social media. About how we share stories. Essays on Instagram, in particular, finding ways to turn the trivial toward—what, we're not yet sure. We're increasingly discovering that the snapshots we've always taken as notes may be more real than the final image, the finished story. Our plan in Paris was to look for what we knew would be an unfinished story, about the so-called "sharing economy" and the deeper sharing promised, not always delivered, by social media. Instead, what at
Travel Ephemera Still Life 741, Sea Urchin (Koufonissi, Greece), 2016 Archival pigment print
first seemed a very different story found us. Not the news of who planned the murders or how or of what kind of warplanes will respond, but of who took us in as strangers in a city under attack and then in mourning. We reported on social media—the media people make together, mediating their grief. "Listen," said Tanja at the first memorial—"the clicks." The click of lighters lighting candles, the click of cameras capturing the little flames..” ii In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag writes “…the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.” iii Ultimately, Hollander’s determination was to lay everything bare, to remind us of the importance of friendship both in life and on line. This project is about collecting the world on our own terms and finding that a gas station egg sandwich is just as good as a French bakery croissant, and that real friends may not exist but real friendship absolutely does.
ii Jeff Sharlet and Tanja Hollander, “What We Saw After the Attacks on Paris,” Esquire, November 18, 2015, www.esquire.com/news-politics/ a39802/jeff-sharlet-instagram-paris-attacks iii
Susan Sontag, On Photography, (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 1
Tanja Alexia Hollander was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972. She received a B.A. in photography, film, and feminist studies from Hampshire College in 1994. Selections from Are you really my friend? were recently exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art (Maine), Virei Viral (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (Dresden, Germany). Receiving international media attention for the project, Hollander was invited to give a TEDxDirigo talk in 2012 and has lectured extensively at Demanio Marittimo.Km-278 (Marzocca, Italy), the University of Maryland, Clemson University, SXSW, and Facebook headquarters. Hollander is represented by Carroll and Sons in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently a resident of Auburn, Maine. Website: areyoureallymyfriend.com Twitter: @tanjahollander Instagram: @tanjahollander Facebook: are.you.really.my.friend
Cover: Design by Luna Cardilli + Ljudmilla Socci (Black Fish Tank) Inside flap: From the series: What is a real friend? (the post-it note project), 2012–2016, Archival pigment print
Tanja Hollander: Are you really my friend? On view February 18, 2017 Principal exhibition support is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Barr Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Massachusetts Cultural Council; the Artist's Resource Trust Fund, a fund of Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation; Designtex; and Color Services, LLC. Major exhibition support is provided by Joey and Ragnar Horn and Caroline Niemczyk. Additional support is provided by Joyce Bernstein and Lawrence Rosenthal.
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