Fictitious Portraits began with the looking glass in Alice in Wonderland. I was thinking about photography as the glass through which we had learned to see the world and ourselves. A photograph appeared to reflect what was in front of the camera, but it also helped determine what we accepted as real—and how we imagined a person should look.

The series consists of three portraits showing one, two, and three versions of the same boy. They are not separate individuals, twins, or triplets. They are different states of one invented person: looking outward, turning inward, and encountering other versions of himself.

The boy was partly an idealized version of my younger self. I chose someone at the threshold of adolescence because that age seemed to mark a passage from innocence into self-awareness. He is beginning to understand that other people are looking at him and forming judgments—and that he must begin creating a version of himself for the world. The figures are bare so clothing cannot identify their decade, social position, or personality. Suspended within a depthless black space, they appear timeless, isolated, and still in the process of becoming.