The number 42 represents "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" according to Douglas Adams in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. My use of it is for a tally of portraits over forty-two years, selecting one image per year, although in a couple of instances I've included a portrait of a portrait. There is a connection, since people give meaning to a life.
The photos were taken with various types and formats of camera, bar one which is a screen grab from a video, and another, the scan of a pencil sketch on A4 paper.
In every case the focus is on someone real (the horse breeder) or made up (Daisy Duck) or abstracted, as in the bronze gymnast and the sculptural self-portraits. They are people I've either known well or encountered briefly across seven countries (four continents), and so not a full biographical record, but rather compiled intersections of time and place.
In some years I took a wealth of portraits and less in others, but a few sheets of negatives have been ruined in their sleeves due to mould, largely a consequence of years spent living in the tropics. In one sense, this collection is a tribute to the survivors with its (almost) unbroken line of direct living portraits of people across forty-two years.
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023