I met Paul in high school.  I often do portraits of people I know and care about.  This is something which the contemporary portraitist Chuck Close does too.  In fact, he doesn’t take commissions.  His explanation is that, if he is going to spend months focusing on a person’s face, it had better be someone he is interested in.

What interests me in a person’s face is different from what interests Close.  Doing the portraits of friends and family members gives me a certain satisfaction—I am, after all, recording my own life through their faces—but the challenge of a stranger has its own allure too.  The question becomes “can I actually capture something significant about this person with only an hour’s interview and some photographs to work off of?”

Andrea became a subject for Swollen when I put out the word to friends that I was looking for a bride-to-be.  She is the friend of a friend and someone I had never met before doing her portraits.