gott sei dank

I made these pictures between 2005 - 2006. Shot on medium-format film with a Mamiya RB67 camera in a tiny Brooklyn apartment. The sets are hand-made, using common household materials. I had one light; sometimes augmented by a flashlight.

The benefit of shooting still-life is that you can “paint” the scene with light as long as you account for the exposure time with your aperture width.

Some of them are lith prints. This is a printing process using special chemistry that allows conditions for tinting the paper, along with other special characteristics like light “bloom”, higher contrast, and expanded dynamic range. It was always my favorite way of printing because each print is unique.

For this series, I think I was trying to explore how to create narrative context within a single-image, but with only a tenuous connection to reality.

By anthropomorphizing, I think I was trying to understand how we can create meaning when we project our personal experience onto a photograph — in much the same way, we might project light on a negative, or print.