working
on the edge
of
photography
My non-apparatus photographic work is grounded in research of the fundamental properties of photography: light, time, process, and materiality. I specifically reference the history of photography in my work to create contemporary ways of working and thinking.
“Freedom is playing against the camera” (Vilém Flusser). It is here in the words of Flusser that I am inspired.
I work without a machine or man-made device to create photographic objects. My typical way of working involves creating photographic emulsions from scratch in my studio. Experimenting with plant-based emulsions and new 21st-century substrates l work in untested territories of the photographic medium. Physically I research and employ new substrates for light-sensitive emulsions to adhere. I play with long exposures and ways of slowing photographic processes down to original invention speeds by concocting emulsions. These photographic objects are the story — they index photography and its 21st-century state which is slippery and without boundary. Low impact photography
Contemporary experimental photography is a moment/crack in photography’s rich history where the decline of traditional techniques and the rise of digital imagery collide and overlap, creating incredible opportunities for disruption and innovation in equal measure.
Photography is usually thought of as a reductive art form starting from reality, yet I think of the abstract photographic practice as an additive process similar to painting or sculpture. I work to add light, time, process, and materiality to create images. My practice involves a rethinking of what photography might be now. I like to disrupt the idea of photography to see something new and exciting.
“Photography is freed from its subservient role as a mode of representation and allowed instead to become a searing index of itself, to become an art of the real.” (Geoffrey Batchen)
Photography, in its most elemental state, is the act of making a mark with light. Contemporary photography transcends representation and becomes a mode of self-expression similar to that of the abstract art movement that began at the end of the 19th century after the invention of photographic techniques.