Studio Sketches 11/28/21
My latest studio investigation has been into my personal family archive. Out of the nearly 3500 slides my family has accumulated between 1960 and 1990, ten of theme stood out. These ten slides had been left out and exposed to the elements in a manner that distorted and damaged the images themselves. I found this both aesthetically and conceptually intriguing.
Upon making the selection of these ten images I laid them out and scanned them at high resolution to be enlarged and printed as stand alone pieces.
The process of discovering these damaged negatives reminded me of a passage from a book, Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of lot 49 wherein the main character is navigating a turbulent world, trying to reclaim a lost sense of self. “So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of.” The protagonist of this novel looked in awe as a mattress flared up around a drunken sailor. She is projecting meaning, history, and a deep sense of emotion onto this mattress. In a similar manner we project entire histories onto photographs. We house our families, our pasts, our losses all in the photographs we take and decide to protect. But what happens when the photographic image doesn’t serve the function anymore? What happens when they fail to archive our memories? What is lost? What is found? What are we projecting onto these images that we hold so close?
This also takes me to Walter Benjamins’s concept or aura ”A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.” I do not understand this concept to as high a degree as I would like so I’ll put some time onto it shortly in order to further connect the dots. Essentially I believe that these photographs possess a certain “aura” a patina of age and degradation over time that makes them completely unique and unreproducible. Ironically I’ve “reproduced these images by scanning them and reprinting them.
Process Images
