Overview
I believe that photographs inherently hold the false hope of permanent memory. People seem to make photographs in order to document a particular moment, assuming that the image or the story behind it will become endlessly accessible. Photographs, however, can degrade physically over time just as our mental ability to recall the stories associated with them can diminish. For the latter reason, even a digital photograph will lose its permanence over time. Neuroscience finds that the more times we access a memory, the more we forget it, and the more altered or false it becomes in subsequent recollections.
In order to play out this paradox, my work deals with images that are impermanent to begin with and undergoing a process of degradation from the moment of their installation. Lumen prints–made with unfixed black and white photo paper–of people I’ve photographed over the years hung floor to ceiling will darken and gradually fade as the sun and gallery lights illuminate them. Unbound anthotype prints–an unfixable photographic process using vegetable pigment–laid in a clamshell box contain unattributed quotes from scholars and philosophers of memory that can be freely handled and rearranged by the viewer. Lastly video that has been degraded through projecting and rerecording footage of nature is looped continuously.
I am fascinated by the power of light to create an image, and also destroy it. We measure lights effects on images and talk of permanence. In the end, images like our bodies and our memories have a finite life.