Tanja Alexia Hollander, Photographer
tanja@tanjaalexiahollander.com
www.facebookportraitproject.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Auburn, Maine
Photographer Tanja Hollander is interested in how we define friendship and who we let into our private yet very public online lives. So she’s set out to make portraits of all of her Facebook friends (626 when she started the project) in their homes, which are scattered around the country and the world.
What started out as a personal documentary on friendship and environmental portraiture has turned into an exploration of American culture, relationships, generosity and compassion, family structure,
community building, story telling and meal sharing, the economy and class, our relationship to technology & travel in the 21st century, social networking, memory, and the history of the portrait. Following in the footsteps of the FSA photographers and Robert Frank she has out to see America and to record how our society uses photography, the portrait social media to create and define our existence.
It's an intimate act to photograph and be photographed, and to have an outsider in your home bearing a camera. Along the way, Hollander is blogging about the people she meets, the food she eats, and the sights she sees.
The end of the project will culminate in a book, real life exhibition, and all of her friends simultaneously changing their profile picture to the portrait she takes of them.
Hollander has launched her second crowd funded campaign, the Great Raffle of 2011, an opportunity to support the project by buying a raffle ticket to win two framed photographs.
Hollander graduated with BA in photography & film from Hampshire College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and she is represented by Jim Kempner Fine Art in NYC and Carroll & Sons in Boston.
Follow her at www.facebookportraitproject.com and on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/are.you.really.my.friend
