Photography taken with a Canon 30D and standard 50mm glass. Edited in Adobe CS5. (Some images taken on film and negative scanned for digital post production).
The impossible image. By shining a light through a camera viewfinder, the apparatus is transformed from a light capturing device into a light projector. Because of it's mirrored shutter, the projected image disappears if any attempt is made by the camera's shutter to capture its own projected image. The image only to reappears when the shutter releases. A camera can capture any image, except the one image it casts.
I will eventually install this image as a sculpture, using multiple lenses and light sources.
The collapse of public and private realms. The visceral human nature housed within these structures is exhumed and juxtaposed with the sterile and serene facades of a neighborhood.
Film is a time based medium and the camera, a mechanism for collapsing time. For every instant in space-time there are in infinite number of potential gestures that may exist, but only one that is actualized. This image, accompanied by the following two in the triptych represent the innumerable implicit actions that lay silently behind every individual explicit gesture.
Inspired by Philippe Halsman's Jump series, this image utilizes the suspended jump to portray a body's surrender to photographic sincerity. However, where Halsman photographed celebrities jumping, this image plays off the aesthetics of a famous best-selling 1985 album cover. Further, by eliminating the top of the subject, the act of the jump has been collapsed with the act of suspension.
Everyday human movement is task and goal oriented. The dance, a series of spontaneous expressive movements, represents the numerous expressive movements a deliberate body ignores as it moves methodically from task to task.
CCW The recent passage of concealed carry in the state of Wisconsin created a rich sociocultural environment for exploring the implicit and explicit anxieties associated with the apparatus of the firearm and the camera. It is interesting to consider the general public's obsession with Hollywood cinema and its attraction to the firearm as a sex symbol and their fear and opposition to the same mechanism when confronted with them in the every day. The same is true with the proliferation and consumption of cameras, and the public's anxiety of being confronted by a lens. This tension has created a nebulous set of cultural norms and societal laws for where and when it is appropriate to have either a camera or a firearm. The invisible borders are surprisingly often loose and arbitrarily placed.
This photography series is meant to confront the viewer with the explicit realities and imposed cultural ideas these objects evoke, and open a conversation about the source of society's multifaceted obsession with and fear of both the camera and firearm.
The proliferation of the camera and firearm across the american landscape have caused a number of media and/or firearm related incidents. These incidents are the root of debate for everything from firearm violence to surveillance disputes.
The destruction of the frame is meant to move the objects from their photographic plane to the gallery space itself. Thus, the objects confront the viewer more directly and raise questions about the anxieties and complications of displaying the actual objects compared to their representation on a photographic medium.
In this image, as well as the previous bathroom location, it is interesting to contemplate the legality of both the firearm's and the camera's presence. Though the firearm is the center of anxiety in the image considering it's role as a sex and power symbol, the camera is the illegal presence while the firearm is often legal to possess in both locations.
