Sentences Without Words
Sentences Without Words
2013 - 2015
“photographs are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing...The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our hands - as an anthology of images...Photographs really are experiences captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography.
Sentences Without Words is a series of photographic works driven by interests in the language and liminal spaces that exist within the photographic medium. Considering the act of making a photograph a process of thought and intentional action rather than a product of reality, I consider the narrative qualities that are inherent within photography and its material processes. Using 35mm analogue black and white photographs and a digital scanner, evidence of dust, scratches and fingerprints, reveal the physicality of the analogue medium as viewed through a microscopic digital lens. A language of the medium itself is evident in the scanning process of the negatives; dust and hair cling to the celluloid provoking nostalgia and sentimentality for moments past. In this way, photography becomes an exercise in articulating the interior self with the goal of piecing together fragments of subconscious thought to unravel what is visible and what is not. In an effort to make tangible the subconscious affect of memory and the embodied experience of seeing, I aim to promote a sense of visual awareness in the minute details of the everyday lived experience.
