Rejecting Disposability

I am interested in caring for my photos and what this means in a digital atmosphere of convenience and disposability.

Caring for the photos means that I take time working with them to adorn them into infinity in my thoughts and actions by considering and re-considering them. I create photos that transfer back and forth between physicality and digitality. This is the equivalent of thought and touch.

I use film to take the photograph for two reasons.

The first is that I like the margin of error that film accumulates in the developing process. This error makes them all individual with different scratches and marks.

Some of the photos might not make it past the developing process and this is okay because then they are not meant to appear. I like the way film makes me feel like I can let go of the process and see which ones make it through the developing process then care for the ones that do.

The second reason to use film is because there are only so many photos you can take on a roll of film, so it slows me down when I am taking photos so that I carefully consider every shot I am taking. These are the photos I have to work with in a “love the one you’re with” mindset.

For others, there are always more photos, because their photos have become easy and disposable now with accessibility to efficient digital cameras, devices, etc. But with the cost and time-consuming nature of film, the photos I’ve taken with film are the ones I work with even if they are not perfect.

This creates an increased commitment and preciousness to the photos.

As I mentioned before, I like the error and clumsiness that my imperfect photos have – they are not carefully set up, they have scratches, some may come out of the development completely black, and so on.

After developing, I scan them and bring them into the digital world. Then I print them.

Dare to say I might mark on them and make them more mine in that mark.

The margin of error comes through in multiple stages of the creation process and, in many ways, this spirit is part of how I shoot, and my creation process.

I call it the spirit of error.

It is a spirit of chance, an off-moment that forces me to contend with the images that exist on edges of other moments.

It is very important to me to notice these moments not only when I am taking the photo but also in the creation process. This is what keeps them relevant in my mind as I keep going back to them.

This is my definition for adorning the photos into infinity—keeping them alive by keeping them alive in my mind (through contemplation) and in my actions.

So by considering and re-considering the same photos, working with them digitally and physically, I am adorning them into infinity. I reject the disposability of contemporary photo culture.

My Archive

My photos are portraits of my friends and myself.

I have the desire to make something tangible that relates directly to the cumulative index of my life.  Now that anyone can be a photographer with cellphones, we are all indexing our lives into an archive. The cumulative archive is flooded and meaningless because it is so overburdened with information.


Penelope Umbrico
Everyone’s Photos Any License, 2015 – 2016, Digital mock-up, 104” x 324”


So why is my archive any different? My archive isn’t different. But it does stand out to me by being cared for and adorned by me.

It is my assertion that my archive is not any different but it does matter because it matters to me. I am exercising care for it in ways that other archives do not receive. These common archives such Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat push information constantly out of relevancy, as it is replaced by other information.

By asserting that my archive matters to me and displaying it for other people, I create an environment of care for them that is not subject to this constant push out.

This environment of care lets my photos avoid irrelevancy. 

This is part of how I adorn them into infinity.

Declaratively Infinite

This relationship I hold to my photos is an ode to the extended Henri Cartier-Bresson decisive photo moment in which the photo was created.

Bresson describes the decisive moment as, “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”1

The decisive moment, according to Bresson, means that the moment the photograph was taken will never occur again in the same way. This concept is important to my work because if no moment will ever occur again, even the simplest in-between moments are unique.

The photograph then acts as a sort of evidence for the “precise organization of forms” that occur in the moment the shutter opened and closed.

I am afraid of not capturing these photographic moments in the same way that I am afraid of the loss of time and memory. The photograph as evidence of my existence and experience is very important to my work and I consider photography a function of memory.

But contemporary photographs are not certain to survive forever because they can be so easily deleted or destroyed. Bringing them into physical form makes me feel better about this because they are made tangible and provide proof through touch.

Roland Barthes reflects on a photograph… “not only does it commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages ... attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes.”2

I relate strongly to the idea of photographs as aging and mortal.

But this ephemerality feels to me like a certain eventual doom for the photograph that I am resisting its demise through care.

However, I feel that if I constantly consider and care for my photographs, their life will extend by maintaining immediacy in my life.

Even though I understand they will die I employ my methods of care to resist it. Adorning my photographs into infinity is my plan of action against their eventual doom.

I live with them and add to them cumulatively.

I am declaring them to persist against the irrelevancy that has become common with disposability of photos. I state my archive to be both declaratively important and declaratively persistent in its existence. 

To Others

I mentioned that my photos are important to me but that does not mean they can be or will be meaningful to other viewers. It is also uncertain that the viewer will be aware of how much I have cared for them.

However, there are layers of care that lend the viewer a sort of glimpse into this care. I call these layers of care “veils.” They are representative of my methods of care I take to adorn the photos.


One layer is the veiling of subject matter. This veiling is seen as abstracted by the blurriness or graininess of the photographs.

It is ambiguous subject matter because I photograph moments of stray body parts and mixed expressions that could give a variety of different reads to the viewer.

This is part of the quality of in-between moments I capture in my photography.

The photos are often veiled in digital filters and laser jet layers of color. I use digital filters to mimic and enhance aspects of film that create error, such as excessive grain or darkness in the photo.

Additionally, I re-feed the paper into the printer to create bands of color overtop the photo after it has been printed once already.

I love the way that the extremely expensive and impressive printers can slip when I am feeding the paper back into the printer.  Often the band of color is slightly crooked where the printer slipped.

It feels comforting and encouraging that even the printer can have a margin of error – this is another way I am making an ode to the spirit of error in my work.




Another method of veiling I use is a layering of painted text.

I install the photo on a wall and finger paint phrases over them so that when they move to their next installation point, only parts of the texts are left and they are fragments of words.

It does not matter for the viewer that the text is illegible because it is not about the text. The text is my indexing of what the photo means to be in my memory.  It is a physical representation of my archive.

The fragmentation of that text is representative of how the archive is changing and my memory is becoming more fragmented with time as I struggle to remember exact details of important moments in my life.  This is something I’m always afraid of and is why I veil my photos with language or other clues, so that I am able to recall it.

But the viewer can’t read the text, they can only reading the remnants of the archive on the photos. It is not important for the viewer to decipher the language because the language has transformed from words to fragmented forms that document words.

The working and re-working of text on the image is a stage in the process of making the photos that occurs naturally because the lacing together of photography and language is an instinct as old as the invention of photography.

Moyra Davey writes that she needs her photograph to “take seed in words” and I identify with this need as well.3

Unlike Moyra Davey needing the photograph to take seed in words, I need the words to take seed in the photograph. By sorting memories, language, and images, I actively curate an archive to show to viewers.

I also use paint as a veil by painting large sections of the photographs and concealing them.
The veiling with large sections of paint is two-fold.
It is a way for me to express that my photos are meaningful to me, first and foremost, and there may be things that I wish to keep to myself.
But it is also a way to highlight particular ideas or areas in the photographs that I do want to draw attention to.
I adorn the photos into infinity by keeping them relevant in my own mind but displaying photos for viewers is another way to keep them from their  eventual doom because they are able to be seen and contemplated by a viewer.

So to be able to display them, I censor the parts that I wish to keep for myself in my own memory.

In this way, I love them selfishly.  But also in this way, I adorn them further into infinity by allowing them to be available to others.

Another method of veiling I use is slicing the photo.

Using one strong cut across the photo I create physical fragmentation that compliments the fragmentation simulated in the bands of color that run across the photos.

This is another way the images are fragmented in my memory.  The photo is in two pieces because the memory of the photo is divided in my memory.  

This can be divided by time, divided by feeling, or divided by something completely unexplainable.




The final veil I use as a method of care for my photos is tracing.

Using a very thin, fine line I outline shapes that are important in the photo.  Often times these outlines are of body parts that create shapes. This helps me index the photos into my archive by breaking them down into shapes and sections.  It also helps me to memorize the moments in the photos that have the most effect on me.

As I continue to fear their eventual doom of fading away into my memory, the tracing of these moments is very important to my method of care for them.

In these marks I commit them to memory.

The tracings are scratchings with a thin needle.

But they do not harm my photos.

The tracings highlight their features and create points of interest for the viewer to focus on.

Some of the moments in my photos I have chosen to highlight with tracings are not recognizable in their importance to the viewer.  This is another way I love them selfishly.

All of the ways I veil my photos allow the viewer to interpret the moments in the photos as clues. I am making the moments in the photograph able to be understood as important by what I have highlighted or not highlighted.

Roland Barthes considers a photo as completely inaccessible, saying they are “unrevealed yet manifest, having that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and the fascination of the Sirens.”4

I don’t believe they are completely inaccessible but I do believe that veiled information in a photo creates a lure such as Roland Barthes states.

This slow or partial release of information creates a tension I like to work with.

It also relates to my selfish love of the photos.

There are some parts of the photos that only I can understand such as the text, tracings, painted sections, and placement of color bands.

However, just because I am the only one who knows why the veils are operating in the way they do doesn’t mean that the viewer isn’t able to make their own deciphering of the clues the veils provide and come up with their own interpretation or appreciate them as beautiful objects.

I veil the photos using my methods of care and these methods are both digital and physical.

The physical marks on the photos seem to be a destruction of them but they are not.

Marking on the photo does not cause it to perish faster because, even though it may cause wear and tear on the surface of the image, it keeps the image alive in its relevance and consideration in my life.

This marking up is a history of care and relationship with the photo, giving it attention and layers of interaction.

My photos are the most effective history-keeper for my archive because they are a palimpsest of my consideration and care for them.

Every touch on the matte paper they are printed on leaves a mark of history.

Every accidental rip and tear leaves a mark of history.

The paint, especially, that builds mountains and valleys in its texture on the surface of the paper leaves a mark of history.

Barthes calls the photograph a “natural witness of what has been” as a “certain but fugitive testimony” of history. 5

Photos are fugitive because they are only fragments of history.

The methods of veiling on my photos, i.e. the digital filters, color bands, tracing, slicing, and paint on the photographs are all physicalizations of fragmentations.

The physicalizations of fragmentations in my photos are representative of the metaphysical fragmentations in my own archive such as false memories or romanticized memories.

These are layers of time and memory.

A stratification of important moments in my life.

Sometimes they are very literal and physical, such as the cut that runs through a few of my photos.

But sometimes they are metaphysical and the fragmentations are the spirit of error that occurs in my own memory.

From the start, my photos are fragmented.

Fragmented from the loss of the moment they were created in and fragmented in every aspect of their creation process, as the spirit of error is unavoidable and therefore, embraced.

And as I do in all aspects of the creation process, I am embracing the spirit of error. I do not avoid it.

In this, I am also embracing fragmentation as an unavoidable part of my archive and, thereafter, my photos.

To embrace it I am highlighting it – in the fragments of digital filters, color bands, painted sections, sliced sections, broken text, or body parts I have chosen to outline in tracings.

On Accident

I use film to shoot because I am fascinated with the margin of error it produces.

I welcome scratches, grain, and dust.

The other type of accident that I am fascinated with happens when I am taking the photo.

Moyra Davey discusses accident and photography by citing Janet Malcolm, a theoretical writer who says, “all the canonical works of photography retain some trace of the medium’s underlying, life-giving, accident-proneness.”6

I gravitate to the idea that accident in photography is “life-giving” because the certain imperfections and accidents in the subject of the photo, as well as the developing process when using film, are what make photos individual.

This “life-giving” quality of photography in my mind is what makes them so susceptible for death and disintegration.

They would not be able to die if they were not alive to begin with.

This individuality also gives them personality, as they are unique in their existence.

When photographs each have their own personality, it is almost impossible for me not to care for them and adorn them into infinity.



Grace Heutel, 2018, Mixed media

Strange Tissue of Space and Time

I bring my photos into the physical world by printing them so they create a physical history for themselves by being objects.

This is because originally they were defined by their “decisive moment,” which is the moment the photographs were taken.

However, I want to create a new decisive moment that is the moment the viewer encounters the physical photo and has to re-align the photo because it has been cut, painted, and veiled in its own history.

The history I make for the photos visible through my methods of care.

This relates to Walter’s “here and now” effect of a photograph – or “its unique existence in a particular place.”7

The here and now of a photograph is the way the physical photograph creates a history by existing in the physical world and then accumulating wear and tear as an index of its existence beyond that moment.

So that when a photo is displayed at any moment in time it has evolved since the last time it was displayed because I am continuously adorning my photos using my methods of care.

So the moment the viewer sees the photo will not ever occur again, because the photo will change as I continue to adorn it.

That is why physical photographs are more unique to me than digital photographs.

They can change in ways that are often irreversible.

My photographs are always evolving and one version of them put on display might affect a viewer differently than its previous version, there is no way to know.

The lens by which people interpret things differently over time is what Walter calls the  “strange tissue of space and time.”8

In this strange tissue of space and time, anything may appear different throughout history.

Additionally, often the marks on my photos are cumulative – layers of paint, deepening holes where I’ve hung them up by pins, etc.

The photos are a palimpsest, or an encapsulated record of history like building a contemporary wing on an old museum.

In this way, the physicality of a photograph makes it a keeper of history that is ever evolving and adds to the idea that they have their own individual personalities.

I have talked about adorning my photos into infinity as an ode, or love letter, to both the moment they were created and their new moment, which is the moment the viewer sees them.

Because nothing lasts forever, this an effort against their certain doom I mentioned earlier.

I want to instead create them into history-keepers.

I want these photos to transcend the strange tissue of space and time.

This, of course, is impossible for them to do.

However, the beauty is in how I keep trying.

Young Adults not Adults

Some photographers who inspire me are Nan Goldin, Samantha Box, Mark Morrisroe, Rona Yefman, and Siân Davey.

Their photos hold a sense of candidness because they are taken in settings of daily life. 

I am also interested in these daily life settings – one that photos are not expected to be taken.

These are in-between moments meaning they are not “photo moments” like events or parties. They are often banal. In this setting of the daily nothingness, there is often a moment of interest that calls the camera out.

These moments “call the camera out” because the oddity of banal moments often happens quickly and briefly – before returning back to the insignificant quotidian of daily life.

It’s so important to me that I catch these moments because they are honest moments of expression.

My perspective is a young adult with my peers so I am able to capture moments of rebellion, light heartedness, or sometimes somber and conflicted moments.

These moments are often laced with the spirit of error that I gravitate to because error is a major part of life as a young adult.

I try to make photographs that are unexpected and subvert the conception of young adults. So that, rather than making photographs highlighting scenes of parties and standards of beauty fulfilled, I make photographs of moments that  highlight youth, in-between time, and spirit of error for me.

These are moments such as a leg of a friend on my bed or an elbow held in the sky to reach a coat’s hood.

Thom Collins in Beautiful Losers discusses this type of punk art, which is rebellious norm-subverting art, describing young artists as using “a way of working within mass media to subvert it on their own terms.”9





Rona Yefman
My Brother and I
1996-2010
 

Puncture

Going back to the moments of oddities that call me to get my camera out, these photos often have a stark element of emotional impact.

In Camera Lucida, this moment is called the punctum—a puncture — in the ordinary.10

It’s an oddity in the moment, and later the photo, that has a subjective impact on the viewer.

Banal photos with punctum hold a beautiful tension between the quotidian of daily life and small oddities within it.

I like how banal photos are relatable to all kinds of viewers because they are familiar and comfortable to us.

However, punctum is not always familiar and it can change a photo from ordinary into confusing and emotional.

The punctum apparent to me in my photographs is my veils.

This punctum exists again after the moment the photos were taken to create a cumulative punctum that uses the methods of care and their own oddities to evolve.

The methods of care I use to conceal or highlight my images create moments of strangeness and tension in the history that I have created for my photos. This tension juxtaposes with the banal settings of the small moments in young adult life.

Before I was here

My previous work has still dealt with similar in-between photographic moments.

I was taking high-resolution digital photos of the grittiness and grossness of young adult life using extreme saturation and sharpness.







Then switched to the slow and meditative process of using film.

I was enthraled by the scientific magic of the development process and the touch of the photographer in the photo’s creation.

It was then I discovered the spirit of error I have come to term as a primary actor in my work.

It is an actor because the random errors in film photography are inescapable and worth considering.

This is why I like the term spirit of error, because it is a tone in the photos.

This tone mirrors the tone of youthful, rebellious, and banal moments I like to photograph.

I found that with film I could let these in-between youthful moments in my photographs stand on their own without the allure of the highly saturated grittiness that I put in my digital photos.

In the film photographs, these moments are quieter and gentler.

These moments are more easily abstracted this way because I focus in on more specific parts of a scene or body.

Karen Irvine discusses Laura Letinsky’s photographs as not-quite-right in a way that “reminds us that all photographs are abstractions – and constructions.”11 Construction is another actor in my previous work.

With the film photography I was introduced to dark room printing.

The idea of constructing different images with film and light onto latent blank paper was exciting to me.

The physicality of the dark room photos appealed to me in the same way my digitally printed photos do now – they had personality and life in their quality of touch.

I constructed dark room photos that were all unique, having their own personalities due to their slight differences.

Their physicality offered me a new way of abstraction.

This occurred in the development process and with the final image.

Then I constructed windows by cutting out pieces of the images and layering them – abstracting and constructing and fragmenting.

But after a while the 8.5 by 11 black and white dark room paper felt constricting to me.

I began to put my scanned film into Photoshop where it could stretch and stretch and stretch.

This is where I am now.

My photos are outside their bounding box, they are big, and most of all… they are colorful.

Color

When I came to film I worked in black and white. I worked this way for a while and got used to it. But I began to notice colors in my daily life. I noticed the ones I gravitated to and the ones I didn’t.

So I made some of my black and white film photos a bright shade of Guinness logo green in the computer. I printed them out 44 by 30 on the laser jet printer instead of 8.5 by 11 in the dark room.

It was a fast and satisfying impulse so I followed it.

I began to notice which shades of green I loved and which shades of green I did not love and I tried to imagine in my head the color balance as it related to the difference.

I began to also notice the way colors I loved interacted with other colors I loved.

So I made a cherry red series.

But some of them came out bruise red, so I fed them back through the printer.

And I made a sky blue series.

But some of the came out too turquoise, so I fed them back through the printer.

I was in dialogue with color in a way that resembled a passive aggressive argument. I was fighting back fire with fire layering different color balances to achieve the perfect shade of color for my photo.

I did all this in RGB because I like those colors the most. RGB as a foundation for color, and therefore as a foundation for painting, oddly did not occur to me until it was an afterthought. If anything, my photos should be separated into CMYK since they are born of digital art.

I gravitated to dark greens, blues, and reds in my work because they nod back to the way I learned about colors in painting class.

Carrie Mae Weems made a series called Blue Notes in 2014 that references her earlier series Slow Fade to Black (2010) which used cinematic fade to highlight the ways black starlets were oppressed by film companies and not granted opportunities because of their skin color.12

In Blue Notes, Weems depicts these starlets and some white artists in a faded blue with bright red blocks over their faces.

The color blocking is very representative, suggesting oppression occurs because of color and gender.





Carrie Mae Weems
Blue Notes, 2014 – 2015



The red feels intense and limited whereas the blue as a background feels as vast as the ocean or the sky.

The colors feel like competitors to me in the same way that oppressed starlets advocate for fair treatment in the film industry.

Weems says, “It is very difficult to move beyond color. On the other hand I am very interested in color theory. What happens when you mix those colors? What do you get then?”13

The color Weems is referring to here is the color of skin and the mixing of people.

I think about Blue Notes a lot.

When I am working with color I do not think in these terms but I do think along a similar track. Colors have an emotional impact for me in so that they help me to understand concepts and experiences - such as the way they do in Blue Notes where I can almost feel the intensity of the boxed red.

I think about the mixing of color.

I think about the mixing of people.

And I think about the mixing of memory as it relates to time.

That is why I assign my photos to a series when I am initially printing them and they all share a color. Images of the same color all contain the same emotional impact in my memory. This is what my work has evolved into.

It is all a way to make sense of my archive as it fragments with the ephemerality of my memory and my photos.

What’s Left  

What’s left for me in my work is to explore other colors that interest me and delve further into my instinct to work in an RGB painting color language.

Saturated RGB color combinations appear frequently in fashion because of their satisfying complementary qualities.

Additionally, I am considering using alternative forms of photo-taking that are in conversation with the digital world such as old flip-phones and gaming devices. These photos are still slow in the way I like to work with in film.

Also, these older digital cameras range from 2.0-6.0 megapixels, which means the photos are filled with spirit of error because they are low quality, pixelated, and often out of focus.

When taking photos on modern digital cameras the quality is so high that the photo feels like a precise record of the moment rather than a living archive of the moment.

I enjoy the obscured photo-taking process because of the way the photo creates a life of its own.

The spirit of error in the photograph is what gives the photos their life, and unfortunately also their death.

I want to see where the use of this new media takes me and the ways in which I interact with these memories differently than film photos.

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1. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 12.
   
2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 93.
3. Moyra Davey and Helen Molesworth, Long Life Cool White: Photographs & Essays by Moyra Davey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 81.
4. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 106.
   
5. Ibid.
6. Moyra Davey and Helen Molesworth, Long Life Cool White, 80.
   
7. Benjamin Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ed. H. Arendt, New York, Schocken, 1969 [1936]) 21.
   
8. Ibid., 23.
9. Alex Baker, Aaron Rose, and Christian Strike, Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture (New York: Iconoclast, 2010) 12.
10. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 95.
    
11. Laura Letinsky and Karen Irvine, Laura Letinsky: Now Again (Antwerp, Belgium: Galerie Kusseneers, 2005), 4.
    
12. Antwaun Sargent, “Carrie Mae Weems on a Career of Challenging Power and Black Representation in Art,” Artsy, October 31, 2016, Accessed March 9, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-carrie-mae-weems-on-a-career-of-challenging-power-and-black-representation-in-art.
    
13. Weems, Carrie Mae. Blue Notes, 2014 – 2015, Accessed March 12, 2018. http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/blue-notes.html.