Fictions

I am interested in the integral seam between the mechanical trace of the camera and the fictions within.  A photograph is simultaneously a map of the maker’s aesthetic decisions and a record of what was once in front of the camera. The aesthetic decisions of the maker betray a kind of fiction:  they imply a narrative which is sometimes personal, and sometimes cultural.    In this series titled, Fictions,  I expose the tools of photographic fiction (lights, stands, silks, clamps, power packs, etc.) in an impassive landscape.  The landscapes, placement, and organization of the equipment vary. However, in each image, the lights denote the presence of an absent subject, while simultaneously alluding to the presence of the maker. The quiet, unresponsive landscapes are an equal subject to the lights.  Shot in remote locations on overcast days, the landscapes imply an ambiguous set of narrative parameters.  Easily anthropomorphized, the lights seem to be an extension of myself.  Within the mute landscape it is the lights that offer us a place - a fiction, to reside within. A secondary body of work accompanies Fictions, much like a collection of footnotes annotates a research paper. In this work, I make use of text itself as an aesthetic material, using 2 point type aligned to the right, obscuring text as a signifier.  What remains is a kind of pulse, where paragraphs and long replies make up the peaks, and shorter statements make up the troughs.  The texts are mostly fictional works by known authors: Samuel Beckett, H. P. Lovecraft, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad.  In some cases the ‘text blocks’ are short stories that repeat themselves, in other cases they are plays written in dialog format, where no increment of writing gets above a few sentences.  Like the images in Fictions, the text blocks take a distanced look at the tools of fiction, allowing the viewer to consider the impulse towards making meaning.