Shannon Taggart and the Third Hand

Shannon Taggart is a talented photographer who invites chance into her photos as a kind of third hand. These images are digital and the effects were made in real time slow exposures, not in post-production. She recently shot these portraits for me of Harvard professor and string theory math genius Shing-Tung Yau. His work is famous for providing the math for proving multiple hidden dimensions. Shannon was the obvious choice, and I was super happy with the result. We hashed out some ideas for the shoot, and started with the notion of the book and the spaces between the pages being hidden dimensions..

Shannon on her portraits project: "The photographs are focused on deconstructing the posed portrait session. Each sitting involved the introduction of a unique element used to invite a chance occurrence. The photographs are a result of that random component, the person and the space around us coming together in odd unison, merged by the camera in a way that could not be anticipated or repeated. These interactions and their results have been mysterious to me. They seem to render the depiction of the subjects unintentionally."