Blacklight Chronicles
(wolfskin self-portraits)
Blacklight Chronicles is the most recent iteration of the Self-portrait Chronicles project, an ongoing interrogation of the ways in which selves outrun their own self-representations, disappearing into the image as a form of metaphysical promise. The Blacklight Chronicles images are self-portraits taken while interacting with a wolf skin, illuminated predominantly with black light. Situated somewhere between enlightenment myths of personal transformation and nightmares of postnatural living, these images are werewolf stories, confronting the awkward conflations of technology and the imagination -- and proposing a quixotic intermingling of identities as a framework for understanding the unintelligibility of presence. If photography can still steal souls, these images ask whether it can also give them back -- not through a reducibility to self-representation, but through it's opposite, a channeling and a possession where the disappearance of representation allows for a converse moment of uncanny apparition.
Unbecoming: wolfskin self-portrait (detail)