Through a Glass Darkly, 2007

Archival silver gelatin prints with black gouache
Size: image approx. 7.5″ x 7.5″

These works are the result of a process of painting on photographs made in the traditional wet-lab. One of the initial notions about the medium of photography is that that the camera captures reality and is therefore truthful; however, photographers have been adjusting tonal values with a brush from the start. Daguerreotypes were colored by dusting on pigment, more contrast was added to collodion glass plates with a lead pencil, negatives re-touched with ink, well before the advent of digital editing. Rather than attempting to improve an inadequate image, in this work the photographic process conveys one kind of information and the hand gestures of painting another. Layering various densities of a matte paint over the soft glossiness of fiber paper accentuates the contrast between flatness and depth.