The Persistence Of Plastic - The Forest

Plastic is immortal because it does not decay. How ever, I do. You can see the AIDS -pictures in "Selfies" section of "The Persistence Of Plastic" body of work. Here you can see the plastic trees that are the basis for my philosophy of life where plastic is a symbol of eternity. In the "Selfies" I deal with the shame I felt after having getting sick with AIDS in 2012. Also plastic causes shame. As one major factor in the pollution crisis plastic causes very negative associations in people. I love plastic! The Persistence Of Plastic is a series of photographs about life and death and it’s marks and traces. Plastic is traces of plants that died hundreds of millions of years ago and which time has turned into oil which man has turned in to plastic items. The circle is complete when we manufacture almost real looking plastic toy trees. With it’s energy of death plastic imitates life. Then I take pictures and save the energy in photographs to remind us of the inevitable death but also about the funny vanity of being a human. The plastic toy tree will never decay and the traces of human being will remain on this planet forever. I have taken all these pictures with my mobile phone camera. The pictures are like selfies that the plastic objects would take of themselves smiling wide! Eternally, in the eternal circle of photography. I am very fascinated by the fact that because of it's reproducibility a photograph does note have an aura to it like the paintings do. Photography has from the start been a mechanical, industrial way of making images where the human hand plays no particular role. In prints the miracle of photography happens under a thin layer of plastic at least in the color print. You can even mount the photograph under plexi-glass. If you lose the negatives somewhere you can always take new pictures of the prints. Of course some fine nuances are lost but the photograph is still capable of speaking the language it was intented to. The cycle is forever and in the digital time it has reached it's pinnacle when you don't need the printed pictures at all anymore. The computer screen is the photography paper of the future. There no one cares about anything else but the story the picture has to tell.