PORTFOLIO: PERMANENT MEMORY
2015
December 29, 2014 (detail),
platinum/palladium print on 10 x 8 inch cotton sheet, 2015
September 19, 2014 (detail),
platinum/palladium print on 10 x 8 inch cotton sheet, 2015
CHALLENGING PERMANENCE IN AN AGE OF ABUNDANT EPHEMERALITY
These images began as Instagram posts—to be admired briefly and then thumb-flipped past, one in an unending stream—or ephemeral Snapchat messages (sitting in digital limbo until recalled by the recipient with a tap; then flashed on the screen with a superimposed timer immediately counting down the few seconds until the image vanishes and becomes inaccessible). Here recorded instead of discarded, they are the essential distilled information about a time and a place: physical memory.
It is from these saved copies of sent digital image messages that analog negatives were prepared for platinum/palladium printing; locating what was intended to be transitory, consumed in a moment and then forgotten, through many dimensions of transformation and interpretation into a fixed form.
The Snapchat images can be identified by the presence of the timer icon in the upper right corner, the countdown forever halted at seven seconds. The square frame of the Instagram images evokes the output of a traditional medium-format camera, yet this is merely the first in a layering of many simulations.
Recent research demonstrates that each time human memory is accessed it is also altered: the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. While the moments fixed here lack the density of real memory, they also are not subject to its whimsical decay: they may be consulted freely and frequently, and will remain essentially as they are on view today, immutable and remote.
—G. A. Carafelli
Philadelphia
August, 2015
PERMANENT MEMORY is on exhibit August 5 – 30, 2015 at 3rd Street Gallery, Philadelphia, along with recent small color works, part of The Light Room’s Fifth Annual Summer Photography Exhibition.
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