Photography in making work

Thinking of the widening gyre today.

I went back to some I-phone photos from a few months ago to do some tweaking and some thinking about parts to isolate or not to isolate.

I'm not a photographer per se, but I use photography as a strategy and element in my work. I am interested in the translation of an image as a photo is taken and interfering with that translation while taking the picture and messing with it after the photo is taken.



I like the pictures my I-Phone takes -- they are relatively low quality (I have an excuse when they are shaky) and always on the dark side particularly because I tend to take them in poor light with no light enhancements beyond the ambient light available in the space or physical area in which I am taking the photo. They usually need a degree of tweeking, which leaves a lot of room for playing with the image. They are not "precious" as I take them either, which allows more freedom.

With higher quality images to start with (when shooting with an SLR camera), I am less inclined to correct them (though, I do correct for light). Most of the time, I don't shoot raw. I should -- every once in a while, I think that there's an image I finished that I would really like to be able to produce bigger but can't enlarge as much as I would like because it started out as a jpeg. Still, mostly I am playing, and for some reason, I feel freer to do so with the smaller files I know are going to degrade a little each time they are saved. (I do keep the originals; it's the copies I play with).



Aspects of degradation are in all my work. It's one of the issues I must work on balancing against. With the current work, I start with degraded or used materials that nonetheless are materials that themselves should last a long time (a lot of plastic!), which means the work has longevity and a degree of permanence equal or near the materials. At least it isn't floating as part of the plastic garbage island in the Pacific.