Artist Statement
The first photograph was a sunburn -- an overexposure that burns away the possibilities of darkness, the possibilities of the imaginary itself. It was Susan Sontag who proposed that the camera is a predatory weapon of sorts, but it was the artist Evergon who put it more aptly by suggesting that the camera is, in actual fact, a coffin of darkness, the last stand of captured night against the illuminations of representational living. For it is within darkness that the imagination lives, gestating, fantasizing, awaiting opportunities for its own form of exposure -- and over-exposure -- that will ensure that the imaginary always remains a salient part of life itself.
My work explores this relationship between darkness and the imagination, mobilizing the codes of photographic representation for their material, psychological and delusional possibilities. If photography under the sign of light is mythologized as that which steals souls, my work attempts to answer the question of whether it can also give them back, not through strict representational construction but just the opposite. For, while photography is often referred to as a "writing with light" -- a vision-based illumination of image -- there is an equally powerful, though less commonly articulated inverse side to photography, namely a debt to darkness -- both with the light-tight shell of the camera, and the light-deprived experience of darkroom processing. Here, it is precisely not vision that governs, but touch -- as film is developed in the night-time blind of tactile awareness -- metaphor for the material skins of living itself. And here, in the codes of darkness and touch, an inverse side of photographic practice is exposed, with all the redemptive poignancy of images stolen and presences returned.