Representations

Representations 2001-2008 Borderless chromogenic prints on Fuji Crystal Archive My series of photographs, Representations, explores the concept of photographic truth and its correspondence to perceived reality. As a playful homage to the 19th-century British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot and his treatise, The Pencil of Nature, I create photographic documents of three-dimensional drawings. I start by collecting everyday objects from the recent past—their designs made obsolete by changes in technology, taste and time; in other words, a phone or television of today no longer resembles those of the past or even the future. I then whitewash the objects with ordinary house paint as a method of erasure, and draw directly onto their surfaces with charcoal to recreate them as visual hybrids; the resulting images make the original object resemble more a symbol or icon of itself, and vacillate between drawing and photography, black-and-white and color, the handmade and the mechanical. The color negatives are printed in the darkroom; no digital manipulation is involved, but the camera’s monocular point of view is imperative. I’m interested in how we learn to see, identify and remember, and the role images play in the codification of perceptual and mnemonic experience. By denying certain aesthetic expectations and assumptions, Representations intends to interrupt a more conventional, passive viewing experience, and provoke the viewer into seeing a photograph as if for the first time.