Photographers, like scientists, record facts about the
observable world. From those facts, they
make inferences concerning larger questions of existence. But unlike
scientists, artists are free to alter those facts to create imagined scenarios
and fictional events. In my series Offerings, I use the materials of natural science—birds,
butterflies, octopuses, eggs, shells, plants—to suggest a strange, shadowy
world where things may not be as they seem. I take as my starting point the
tradition of documentation as established in the eighteenth and
nineteenth-centuries by scientific artists and photographers during the great
age of exploration and classification.
However, my purpose is not to document but to suggest the mysterious
power and purpose within a natural world that often seems more surreal than
serene.
My photos
are first made as ambrotypes using the wet plate collodion process on
glass. I then scan the plates, and
enlarge and print them digitally. By using a nineteenth-century process, I
allude to earlier natural philosophers who gathered specimens from far and wide
in order to understand their world. By
using twenty-first-century digital technology, I enter our own era where visual
truth and scientific facts are increasingly fluid, often unverifiable, and
frequently surreal.
While
photography is itself a form of specimen collection used to investigate the
visual world, it is also a medium for investigating the incomprehensible realms
of the imagination. In Offerings, my goal is to use photography to straddle two seemingly
incompatible kinds of knowledge: fact and fantasy.
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