These images are all made in camera using a 4x5, sheet film, and personally hand made darkslide masks.
Artist Statement:
Lately I've been thinking about the concept of what exactly it means to be "inspired" by something or some one. For me personally when myself or a piece of my work is inspired by something it is a conglomerate of my experiences, the roadmap of the inner workings of my mind, and then the influence those both have on my reaction to another piece of work. In the case of these dark slide masks my main inspiration came from a concept that is predominate in a large amount of American Post Modern literature and French Absurdist literature post WWII. Ultimately there is a limitation (or fragmentation) that occurs with language and human interaction that prohibits us from fully expressing and understanding one another. For me personally I'm fascinated by the inherent isolation and loneliness that spawns from the information that is lost in translation during the journey from one's brain to one's verbal expression to another person's groundwork for interpretation.
A camera is a recorder of information -- we introduce light, texture, and shapes and in return we get an image that communicates to the viewer what we present to the camera. The black areas of these images are representative of information that has been lost (or information that has been lost in translation from the beginning stage of light, texture, and shape to the last stage in the form of a 'complete' image). Each square represents information that is trying to come together to communicate a full complete expression but ultimately fails. The black areas are representational of the information that has been lost.
I chose to mask these in camera as opposed to in the darkroom because I want the information to be unrecorded and lost, not just edited out.
