Visual Essay
This body of work explores our relationship to images, especially with increasing technological access, and our current blindness to the photograph itself — when images are forgotten as representations and mistaken for reality.
Using a large format camera, I photograph composed images, words, reflections, and grit, contained within my personal computer screen. The clearly visible surface of the screen redirects the viewer’s attention from what the photograph is representing (the subject) to the unintended and overlooked attributes of the medium—surfaces, context, and materiality. The proximity of image to text placed together on a screen mimics how we are accustomed to seeing words in relation to imagery in the everyday – media, advertisements, billboards, cell phones, laptops, and so on – and then disrupts it. Text and image become linked with uncertainty, creating a relationship between the two that is not caption nor definition nor reference; the ever growing, shifting, and changing screen, becomes static. In this, I attempt to de-familiarize our cultural atmosphere by exaggerating it, foiling it. By breaking apart and reassembling these systems of communication, my work makes visual the ambiguities of both image and text, and their material context to recognize the hidden process of individual interpretation in the reception of photographic and photo-textual information. All of these images are fragmented experiences of my life, reformed and manifested into a final image, but nevertheless their interpretation is not confined to that. Through this work, I hope to demonstrate the very conscious decisions we are able to make, when we truly pay attention, in constructing meaning from language and experience.