Then, on New Year’s Eve 2010, she found herself on Facebook, instant-messaging with a filmmaker friend in Jakarta, Indonesia, and at the same time writing a letter by hand to a friend in the military in Afghanistan. “I started thinking about friendship,’’ Hollander says. Soon after, she launched a fund-raiser over the Internet and set off on her Facebook-project odyssey.
The Facebook aspect introduces a potent, hard-to-resist conceptual frame to her work.
Portland Museum director Mark Bessire, who also curated Hollander’s exhibit, says the Facebook component drives many interesting conversations. “What’s the long-term impact of Facebook on friends? Who are our friends? Long-term friendships, professional friendships, others - there’s no way to segment that on Facebook.’’
Hollander’s portraits of her Facebook friends - including a photo of Bessire with his wife and two daughters - were almost always shot in their homes. “In the beginning, I was so surprised at how welcoming people were. People were feeding me, giving me their cars, introducing me to their friends and families,’’ Hollander says. “It was like the olden days, with me arriving in my wagon, and people welcoming me and offering me what they had to share.’’
When she couldn’t photograph people in their houses, she shot them where she could: musicians on tour buses, an artist, Kyle Durrie, at her mobile letterpress studio inside a retrofitted truck.
She witnessed friends, many of whom are artists, struggling with the sputtering economy. Several showed off how they are managing. “I’ve never seen so many chickens, prize roosters, and gardens,’’ she says.
Hollander’s studio is at the Bakery Photographic Collective, in a mill building in a Portland suburb, where she has lined the wall with a miniature mock-up of the “Are You Really My Friend’’ installation. In the museum exhibit there are two large framed prints and dozens of smaller unframed ones arrayed side by side for 70 feet - along one gallery wall, around a corner, and down another.
