My generation might be the last to have believed in any form of photographic truth. People are now ‘surprised’ if they find out an image hasn’t been altered in some way. I feel that my work is exploring this predisposition while aspiring for a better, stranger kind of fiction, one that may contain elements of distortion and exaggeration but is anchored by chance. I am using the language of ‘staged color narrative photography’ to subvert from within this tradition by letting life back into the images and favoring the photographic over the painterly.
These photographs are attempts to deconstruct the failure of ideas. I’m interested in what I can learn by allowing a ‘staged’ photograph to break down and, I hope, then spiral into the spontaneous. Ideally a post-performance energy is released into the image to amplify a range of potential meanings and reveal more than I would have been able to imagine myself. This tension between spontaneity and theatricality lends itself to a different type of discovery, one that cannot be achieved by the idea alone.