After Image

An afterimage is an image that belongs to the eye, a temporary ghost image, burned in the retina as an optical illusion. It represents what has already been seen. In this series I photograph a projection of running vintage 8mm film. Recorded using long exposures, the images blend and merge leaving behind a faint image of what was. The burned out images becomes a stain of light as it spills beyond their frame. This project expands upon my interests in the relationship between light and photographic representation. Printed small in scale using nontraditional materials (transparent film layered over silver chrome paper) I constructed abstractions. In this series I reduce the referent to the photographic materials, its light-capturing properties and the light that mediates how we view and experience photographic imagery. I suspend the need to reproduce anything other than the idea of a photographic image, challenging the notion that a photograph is descriptive in nature; shifting the attention from what is represented to the process and materials of the medium itself.