TIME AND MATTER PHOTOGRAPHY / HOT GLASS PHOTOGRAPHY

The images I am submitting here are examples of some of my work I call “TIME AND MATTER PHOTOGRAPHY.” The pictures are not mere ink and photo emulsions or digitally recorded versions of their subject, they are made from the subject they depict. They represent the fixation of their subject not only in the temporal instant that the underlying photo is generated, but also in the atoms— the dust, the ash, the hair, the soil, the rust, the DNA— the substance that constitutes the final recognizable image. I can make a picture entirely of virtually any material that can be photographed. The possibilities are almost endless. When a person views a photograph, they do not usually attribute much significance to what makes that photograph possible. All that usually matters to the viewer is the resulting image, that can be reproduced a thousand times with no change in meaning. My “time and matter photography” images are very different: because the image derives “ENTIRELY” from the substance of the subject it depicts, and because the amounts of matter available for me to work with are often very limited, the final original pictures are usually highly constrained in terms of their number, and no two images could ever be an exact reproduction of each other. In this way, I am working to resynthesize the significance of what a photographic image means. It isn’t simply a picture of a thing, and object, a person, nor a place. UNLIKE ANY OTHER PHOTOGRAPH, THESE PICTURES ARE ALSO DEFINED AND LIMITED BY THE MATERIAL THEY ARE MADE OF.