Life is a cannonade of faces flitting through our lives – familiar and unfamiliar.  The faces of friends and loved ones.  The faces of strangers.  The face has become the fulcrum of human interaction, the spectrum of mood divined through our focus, our perception of the curve of someone else’s lips, the tightening of the eyes.  It is no wonder that our fixation on faces has become the hub of portraiture, but we have forgotten so many other fundamental elements in the frame that feed us clues to the guarded secrets found in each person.  However, there is much more to expression than just a face.

Steve Homol is a freelance photographer based in Arizona who developed an early interest in portraiture immediately after being given a point-and-shoot camera.  Skunk Nuts, his enigmatic alter ego, who nascently coalesced out of a shimmering desert mirage, soon noticed marginal elements that made their way within the borders of an image.  Soon, he was extracting Jungian archetypes from the mundane, drawing in foreign objects into the frame, even the environment, to capture the essence of the narrative instead of the face. This gestalten method of pulling and manipulating all of the surroundings give the photographer and subject more freedom to work together as artists in a collaborative way to convey the essence of a story, a magical one. 

PERIPHERAL BENT and THE DOWNSIDE OF HEADWAY are both series that illustrates this ethic.  The subject’s facial features, and facial expressions, are deliberately obscured, allowing the individual photographed to be on equal footing with all other elements within the frame.  Just as our interpretation of the face is imperfect and people can hide their hidden and unseen secrets behind their eyes and smiles, this series insists that the observer find meaning in external sources – a saw, a cone, a fish – instead of looking into a face.  The frame becomes an intersection of the urban landscape, a subject, an object, and how they relate to each other.  The photographer dares you to ascribe the correlation, unwittingly delving deeply into your own psyche and imagination, projecting your own persona onto the faceless subject.  In this way, Skunk Nuts becomes the mirror to the chiaroscuro of your own heart.