I tend to shoot very extemporaneously (photos, that is...) which means I look through my back files and negatives and I find a great deal of fascinating images, playing with texture, light and form, but not quite robust enough to be a freestanding print. Texture alone won't hold a person's attention for long. So I turn to the classic power of photography... to translate reality. By taking away color you look at an image differently. By compressing an object into a set frame you disassociate it from it's actual environment and scale. In other words, the most ordinary object can be made to look completely foreign when in a photograph. It makes a person reexamine the mundane things around them. That's step one, which all photography does, abstract the real world. Step two is to compose these shots (which are now more form, texture and light than actual representations) into juxtaposing compositions to highlight the attributes of each. You can see the triptychs I've done before. But having all of these 5" square prints, with no set orientation or relationship, I want to play with how to present a larger number without individual prints losing their impact. I think 9x9 will be as large as I could imagine, but it's an easy concept to play with. I also wonder If I should keep the matting around each shot, or if I should butt them directly against each other. I'll keep you updated, and post any progress I make with this thought. Until then, just enjoy the handful of experiments I posted here.
