The conceptual theory behind this body of work comes from an essay by Allan Sekula called "The Body and the Archive," published in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography in 1989. In his essay, Sekula discusses the differences and similarities of archives and composite images, describing a composite as "a collapsed archive." 

 

Summarize is a series of ten composite images that builds on Sekula's ideas and references contemporary artists such as Idris Khan. Each composite image consists of 50-90 layered images. I am interested in using the composite, or layered, image as a way to explore the way we summarize large amounts of information in order to better grasp it. I use photography because it is a common act of archiving. Photography aims to capture and preserve a particular moment, which when collected together and compressed into a composite, act as a summary of an extended amount of time.