Witness (2017)
Artist statement
A photograph records exclusively what the photographer has witnessed at a particular time and place. This limiting nature of image-making aroused my curiosity to explore its potential for reinterpretation. In this series, I photographed images on books made by other photographers whose work has always intrigued me. Using pre-existing images as an entry point, I discovered a rather different fragmented reality from what the original images have preserved. 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.