Agave Caymanensis (Not a just image, just an image)

Ever since photography's inception, there has been an interest in the camera as a vehicle to see alternate realities or new truths. Emerging from 19th century post-mortem/memorial photography, spirit photography and early photographic experimentation like that of Eadweard Muybridge, photographers have been quick to explore the new kinds of visual information and truths photographs could offer. The early occult and early scientific uses of photography are histories that are inherently parallel because they both used photographs to substantiate and make physical a claim to reality. Our relationship with technology is one of desire. And I approach my photographs as a site of perhaps my deepest desire: a medium for transformation. I continue to ask myself: at what point does a photograph of something transcend being a recorded image and become it’s own experience?

In the body of work "Not a just image, just an image" I have photographed peripheral landscapes (along roads and highways, on the sides of trails) where life and death in the vegetation is perhaps a more subtle product of the man-altered landscape. Using Aerochrome color reversal infrared transparency film, I am able to actually photograph life and death in the landscape. The film, intended primarily for land surveying purposes, photographs living vegetation as a vibrant pink/red because of its reflected infrared light. But instead of cold clinical land surveying, I try to misuse this discontinued media in order to uncover something more poetic about the crisis of an ever-changing landscape.