The “Holding” series, utilizes created images and found photographs to present a place between truth and fiction. These contrasting images sit side by side with a thin line painted across their surface, drawing imagined connections. I’m interested in combining photographs I’ve made of empty spaces (spaces once inhabited or currently inhabited, but with no one present) with found photographs of times that no longer exist (images that are empty of personal memory). The titles are constructed by using two identifying words for each image used in the diptychs. The spaces in my photographs are identified by their non-present owner or descriptively; the appropriated images are titled by that which seems most relevant to me about their denotative content – in a few this may include information from the back of the image. Appropriated images are stripped of their tone and cropped but nothing else is disturbed in the image (scratches, imperfections, contrast, etc.) where as my “space” images are adjusted in the same way I would in the darkroom.
This work is dedicated to Nancy Leighton McWilliams, my “Muzzie” who I barely knew.
It is my intention to make several “chapters” of this body of work, each dedicated to a person of influence in my life. For each “chapter” my photographs are made in the location of “home” and while appropriated photographs are collected in the same spirit, they are not necessarily of that place.
