A Snapshot Revisited is an investigation into the act of looking at photographs. Colored by idiosyncrasy, this act of looking varies from person to person and calls into question the information contained within a photograph. This mixed media work examines the ontology of photography, and its relationship to understanding. While photography promises to remember more, capture more, to substitute for more, it continually points out its own failures to communicate and replace that which it records.
This photograph of two figures represents my interest in sentimental snapshots. I am not completely sure why I chose to document this exact moment, the unwrapping of Christmas candles. Humor, endearment, preservation, collection, extortion? Memory is imaginative when recalling lived experiences. Relying on memory alone, I made a small painting that aims to portray my own ever-evolving recollection of this recorded experience. Does the more we see an image make the lived experience more (or less) real I wonder.
This project is also a series of large paintings. The information present in these abstract paintings, generous and absurd, depicts intimate experiences recovered from my smartphone snapshots. When painting I reinvest in the emotional resonance of these nostalgic experiences frozen inside a snapshot and contemplate the impressionable nature of memory. Photographs today are made in a fraction of a second and consumed in equal duration often within an endless algorithmic stream of social consciousness. My work in contrast slows down this process and observes. This act of looking—both provoking and reflexively studying my relationship with the image—considers photography’s impact on shaping identity and understanding personal history.