I am a photographer who uses images and objects to experiment with the transformative and communicative nature of image making. I am interested in the tradition of documentary photography, and explore it through participation within its tradition as well as through its critique and deconstruction. I have spent time photographing communities of fisherman, skateboarders, and gun owners, all in an attempt to shine a spotlight onto those that are on the fringes of mainstream image representation.
The tradition of documentary photography has established expectations about what qualifies as fine art photography. Artists including Bruce Davidson and Cian Oba-Smith serve as stylistic and conceptual inspirations, but I find that the conventions that come with that mode of image making to be limiting. Inspired by MoMA’s Photography into Sculpture, 1970, I create objects and images that question the function of photography in a contemporary fine art setting. What constitutes a photograph? How does the function of an image change when taken off the gallery wall? Using liquid emulsions such as cyanotype, I create images outside the accepted and expected realm of art photography. By shifting away from institutional art spaces, I also explore the notions of accessibility and viewership. The images I make in this line of work do not appear as photographs as we have come to expect them. This is a practice of transformation. By intertwining photography into everyday objects such as shirts and bags I examine the idea of fine art photography and its accepted conventions of display. By transforming everyday objects into photographs, I offer an alternative mode for the presentation of artwork. Moving into the landscape, both urban and natural, the work goes on to examine the relationship of artwork and its site of installation, thinking of Robert Smithson’s ideas of the site/nonsite relationship, where the documentation of the objects serves as the nonsite representation of the site specific works.
