Underwater In 8 Steps

Many of my projects are experiments in which the external world is lensed in a way that considers inner reality and visual perception; photography implies an objectivity, whose impossibility masks potent subjectivities. The alchemists believed in transmutation: changing a thing from one state into another, higher form. This transmutative elevation is achieved through color and chemical action. "Underwater In 8 Steps" was created by working directly on photographic paper with light and chemicals. I choose to return to these irreducible elements, the invisible tools of analogue photography, in order to produce a new, tangible photographic subject. Taking the camera away from photography doesn’t remove the possibility for an image, instead it provides space for proposing images for an un-lensed, visual world. Works such as these invite viewers to engage in an unconventional relationship with photography, to decouple themselves from preconceived notions of what a photograph is, must or can be. These images are not representations of something else in the world, they are that something else in the world.