Artist statement: The camera is a collecting machine that reduces the world to a list of things to photograph. I take up where photographers leave off.
To collect is to gather your thoughts through things. My work repurposes discarded family snaps, images from defunct newspaper archives and those dissembled from the cinema machine. All of the photographs are sourced on eBay, and come from across the globe. The internet is an enormous unhinged album. This work is an assembly of pairs of otherwise disconnected images. I treat the photo-collection as a medium and position the world as a puzzle. My work seems to say: if only we could find all the pieces, we might solve that puzzle. It’s a folly of course.
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
