This project is an extension of my interests in artifact collecting and in the process of photography, as the series relates directly to post-production and the afterlife of a photograph. By mapping out previously hidden aspects of my commercial photographs, I am stripping down my images to display both randomness and the embedded identity of the artist.
These deconstructions are meant to deliberately obscure the original intent of the photographs by introducing abstraction, and, by peeling away layers, to let them reveal themselves as a series of transparencies displaying the inner workings of each image.
Photography is a product of light. By its very nature it has always been a sort of visual alchemy, representing the fusion of the mechanical and the immaterial. Man Ray’s rayographs have strongly influenced my thinking about this series, as these deconstructions, like the rayograph models, seek to transform light into lines, shapes, colors, and gradations through a process of subtraction.
When the original photograph is stripped away, a “shadow” is often left as the remnant of image correcting: these deconstructed photographs might therefore be seen as image “leftovers” In them I want to highlight the fact that a contemporary photograph inevitably exists beyond the moment when camera and lights are set up and the primary image is taken. Instead, the primary image can be viewed as a template upon which a nearly infinite number of digital enhancements may generate a new image—sharing a color palette, line, or authorial gesture with the original, but transforming it into an evocative other.