| Description |
Through my works and research I investigate the photographic medium's ambiguous nature as a simultaneously aesthetic and empirical object. Combining a vast assortment of photographic mediums from contemporary GIFs to historical processes such as the Cyanotype, my work reveals the multiplicity of the photographic form and its dubious ability to function within seemingly contradictory systems of knowledge. Interrogating the processes by which photography has been used and abused, my project does not pursue definitive answers or reveal the "truth" of photography, but rather underlines the importance of seeing photography in a new and radicalized fashion. More than just a series of artworks, my project seeks to bring a serious discourse on photographic meaning into dialogue with diverse audiences including the fine arts, scientific community, and academia. Ranging from ethnographic studies to crime scene documentation and academic microfiche collections, the photographic form incorporates and is encompassed by a heterogeneous field of knowledge production whose histories and structural foundations are inexplicably dependent on this seemingly benign form. Questioning the epistemological systems that utilize photography, the artworks created throughout my project reveal the contradictions, conflations, and influences of these systems on one another as they compete to define the extent and structure of photography. Forcing two distinct photographic methodologies (such as archival/aesthetic or forensic/experiential) into a single frame, my body of work reveals the limitations of each classification as they seek to mutually negate one another from the photographic milieu. Creating images whose two primary interpretations systematically undercut and exclude one another from ii the definition of photographic form allows for a moment of clarity In which the utter instability of the photographic image reveals itself. This dismantling of the photograph demonstrates the inability of a single epistemic interpretation to adequately sustain the ambiguous nature of photography and highlights the necessity of critically reinterpreting and complicating its traditional narratives. |
