My work consists of photographs of constructed paradoxical scenes and visual illusions, challenging the viewer’s perception of reality and certainty. The work forces a confrontation between photography’s legacy as a document of truth and the contemporary reality of digital manipulation and fictitious imagery.
My artistic practice is rooted in the rich history of chemical photography, specifically the wet plate collodion process. Upon photography’s inception, people saw the medium as representing absolute truth — a direct chemical imprint of reality. The wet plate collodion process is rich with distortions, bubbles, and streaks—artifacts that serve as markers of authenticity and evidence of a direct process rooted in chemistry and physics.
In creating my work, I use contemporary digital manipulation techniques and miniature construction to build these surreal or impossible scenes. The resulting constructed image is then photographed using the wet plate collodion process, a crucial final step that introduces the chemical artifacts, texture, and physical markers of an authentic, truthful photograph. High-resolution scans are taken of the final photographs to create large-scale prints for a gallery setting.