Artifice

ESEMPLASTIC EXPANSIONS

My background in photography is very traditional. In the past ten years, however, I have diverted my efforts from traditional photographic methods to leverage current technology in ways that allow a much broader set of possibilities for crafting an image.

This recent series of images comprise an evolution of approach to photography that I have developed over time– resulting in a very specific way of working. I accumulate photographs in order to build a final image, whose content and formal elements were often conceived without ever looking through a camera. No “decisive moments” here. I have always been struck by the artifice present in all photography, and the medium’s inability to truly represent reality. However, I’m paradoxically aware of photography’s usefulness in crafting one’s own.

I have become a collector. Visualizing an image now has less to do with honing my ability to “see” like a camera does, and more to do with visualizing what a picture may finally look like, then going forth to collect the images necessary to build it, (sometimes in the thousands). Crafting the final picture begins with an empty slate, and configuring the final image is a time-consuming process that is unrelated to traditional photography, and more akin more non-photographic artistic disciplines.

Walking around looking for interesting juxtapositions of well-lit objects and landscapes to frame in a viewfinder is less appealing to me now. These days I do look for pictures, but within a broader temporal context, and with a less fully formed notion of the final image. These pictures are never about a single moment, but often spawned by an idea that requires the collection of many individual images over varying measures of time, which are later crafted into a final configuration. I love the rendering of a chunk of time into an image that could, at first glance, be read as a single moment– a closer look revealing the recording of an hour or so. I enjoy artificially expanding a small scene into a more vast landscape that also renders an expanded temporal experience.