My practice explores the limits of photographic representation through the use of found images and archival methods. Using photographs that lack ownership, and engaging with ethics, memory, absence, and loss, I map what remains when context is disrupted or removed.
Photographic Process and Images
The work could be considered orphaned, due to the photos existing without ownership.
My photographic process often involves working with images that were never intended for public view — undeveloped negatives, discarded family photographs, anonymous snapshots — each a fragment of an incomplete archive. By recontextualising these materials, I question who has the right to assign meaning, and how photography functions when ownership is missing. The work exists in a space of tension, using visual remnants to trace narratives that are not ours to assign meaning to. The ownership being missing, however, creates a beautiful moment of intensity that may never have intended to be seen by people, other than the person taking the photograph.
What is a photograph before it is seen?
My work considers the ontology of undeveloped images as objects that exist within the tension of absence and presence.
Some of the images are damaged, or manipulated. This is part of my ongoing investigation into found family photographs and the silent narratives they carry when dislocated from origin.
My process includes a collection of found imagery, and photography. They are collected and kept meticulously, after being scanned and saved.
This image was retrieved from a charity shop collection. Its author is unknown, its context lost. What remains is a visual remnant of someone’s undocumented history.
Some notes and objects have personal information, like addresses, or names.The forms of assemblage, can be considered graphical, and sculptural.
Some images are unreadable, and unknowable.The work is sculptural, and mapping points of human existence.
Some images are faded from years of aging.The images are a collection of unknown authors and subjects.
My process involves sorting, selecting, developing film.My work is a form of assemblage, which brings together discarded materials, creating fractured narratives from forgotten fragments.
