Paramount (2006). Gelatin silver print (from pinhole negative),
11 x 14 inches.
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In 2006 I began using a pinhole camera to record scenes from popular motion pictures, directly from a VCRT television screen. I was interested in the process and the effect of this translation: how the pinhole camera provides a meditative view of a (cinematic) moment in passing, and how the resulting imagery pictures the flow of the disappearing impressions that comprise the cinematic experience. I found it striking, that the pinhole images seemed born of an earlier time, thus serving as an aide-memoire to past ideals and other things lost in time.
Arcadias takes this activity into the realm of the romantic landscape. In this new series of photographic works, I attempt to draw out the formal and conceptual relationships existing between new cinematography, 19 th century Romanticism, and the tradition of American landscape photography. Also existing in these works are questions of place, and the paradoxical desire to be lost in a narrative, while remaining grounded by a particular setting.