holditorloseit

A photograph records only what the photographer has witnessed at a particular time and place. This inherent limitation of the medium has led me to consider its potential for reinterpretation. In this series, I re‑photographed images from photobooks that had long intrigued me. By using pre‑existing work as an entry point, I uncovered a fragmented reality distinct from what the original artists had witnessed. The soft‑focus, painterly quality is employed with the intention of weakening an image’s specificity—allowing its visual description to reference less, or not at all, a particular time and place. “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”¹ If that is true, this series represents my attempt to disclose a reality that has already been disclosed, and to search for a new vision within the seemingly fixed statement of the photographic record.

¹ Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001), 92.