Witness (2017)
Artist statement
A photograph records exclusively what the photographer has witnessed at a particular time and place. This limiting nature of the medium has led me to contemplate its potential for reinterpretation. In this series, I re-photographed images on photobooks that had always intrigued me. Using pre-existing work as an entry point, I discovered a different fragmented reality from what the artists had originally witnessed. The soft-focus, painterly quality is utilized with the intention to weaken an image’s specificity—allowing its visual description to make no or less reference to a specific time and place. “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”1 If that’s true, this series is my attempt to disclose a form of reality that has previously been disclosed, and to search for a new vision in the seemingly fixed statement of a photographic record.