The society we live in focuses on superficial beauty, and as a photographer I am a participant in this as much as anyone else. But I wanted to make photographs that transcend the societal focus on physical beauty and engage with the nature of who a person is at their essence. What they represent and who they are. Not just what they look like.

My impressions of people in my life are an amalgamation of every experience that I have shared with them. No person is perfect, and no memories are all one sided. These images represent the overall idea of a person. The good and the bad, an entire lifetime of knowing someone in a fraction of a second.

This imagery takes the myriad of experiences and expectations and blends all of them together. A single image is created by layering hundreds of images of a single person in order to create a ‘sense’ of that person, and how I see them. Some of the images end up being representational, while others become more ethereal, which is illustrative of the variety of people in my life.

— Matthew Dols

Discover more of Matthew’s work at www.matthewdols.com