It is impossible to speak of the conceptual weight of this project without reflecting upon the technique from which this series is made. Artists such as Henry Peach Robinson and his fellow pictorialists composed images and altered their appearance form the straight negative. Joel-Peter Witkin, a more contemporary example, alters his images using various scratching and bleaching techniques. With these techniques in mind, my project starts with an Analog negative composite. Shooting composites of both the organic and inorganic forms, I use a variation of scratching and blending technique, resulting in an image of five to ten separate negatives. I photographed sections of arms legs and other body parts, isolating just a portion of the resulting image. I photographed them on a black background as to keep its grounding surface transparent. Marrying digital and analog processes, I then take the scratch negative and scan then with a drum scanner at high resolutions, composing the final images in Photoshop. Inkjet prints became this stages output. I then re-photograph these inkjet prints as to obtain an image from which I can print, straight onto fibre based photographic paper, again, switching digital to analog. The purpose for printing onto this medium comes from both my appreciating for the master printer and the need for traditional process preservation, but also to obtain the subtle nuances and connotations that fibre paper embodies. Printing this re-photographed image onto a 4x5 piece of paper, allows me to then manually manipulate the paper. I carried these images around for a week. They sat at the bottom of my school bag; I ate lunch and split coffee on these prints. Not only do I appreciate these relics, but I am also disrespecting the formalist qualities that we try to appreciate as photographers. We treated our negatives and print as masterpieces, yet I decide to deconstruct these ideals. The final output in the project becomes high resolution scans of the manipulated fibre prints. Printed larger than life (20x24 ideally 30 x 40), and the small unrealizable cracks in emulsion, staining, and grain structure becomes revealed in authenticity. The importance of this process is not just to ultimately gain a striking aesthetic image, but also to marry the process from which the subject matter is influenced. A balanced marriage upon the two very physical elements of both digital and analog medium is important in order to comment on both their strongest contributions to photography, and its ever growing obsolescence.
