Memory Mechanism
My family and friends are spread over several continents and multiple marriages. People gather from their disparate lives for weddings, funerals, going-away parties, or a visit to an ancestral village. I photograph these rites of passage, and smaller family occasions. The images are composite panoramas created by incomplete frame advances and accidental double exposures. I pick out a contiguous section of a strip of film to print the final image.
Memories are incomplete, overlapping, and obscure. These photographs replace the empty clarity of snapshots with something flawed, layered and confused, something less resolved. The work also co-opts and displaces memory; the pieces are, in a way, memorials.
The individual exposures are made rather casually. The overlaps and sequencing are mostly unplanned and unforeseeable, juxtaposing incidents, conversations, and scenes that occurred at different times and sometimes in different spaces.
I use toy cameras, medium-format Holgas, with either their original plastic lenses or with vintage lenses from 35mm folding cameras. The image falls away at the edges, so the overlap of one frame on the next provides blending and more-or-less correct exposure across the join.
The film is scanned, and exposure differences balanced electronically. The film manufacturer's logo is cropped from one edge of the image, but in most cases the frame numbers are allowed to show on the other edge. The file is printed to a considerably enlarged inkjet internegative which is used to make Platinum/Palladium contact prints. I use this process for its soft-toned rendering and for its permanence, appropriate to memorials but not to memories.
The final two pieces explore the limitations of what a family makes public.
2007 onward