Margaret Salmon (1975, New York, USA) creates stylized portraits that weave together poetry and documentary. Focusing on individual characters in their everyday habitats, her slow-moving films capture the minutiae of daily life, infusing them with a certain grandeur. Salmon portrays the common struggle of ordinary people, constructing documents that represent characters in a social context. Her position is never aggressive nor intrusive, but balances intimacy with respectful distance, creating laconic yet moving works that are at once sober and lyrical, filled with a fragile sense of humanity.
Source book published on the occasion of the exhibition Margaret Salmon at Witte de With, 20 May to 19 August 2007.