For me the most exciting part of traditional photography is what I call the latent image state. It is the time between pushing the shutter and looking at the developed negative. Looking at the finished prints is somewhat anticlimactic. Even after having printed a quite satisfactory photograph the elated feeling soon gives way to dissatisfaction. The finished photograph is frozen in time, a thing from the past - you can look at it but you can't change it.
The computer adds flexibility: the image is never finished; you can add to it or start over from scratch. It is both a blessing and a curse. The process of creating an image is more like painting than photography. The biggest challenge is to know when to stop.
I developed an interest in manipulating images and stretching the boundaries of traditional photography years before finding my way to the computer. In my current work I combine images from many different sources. Along with the landscapes and interiors that usually come from my own files I appropriate old photographs of people. The finished images juxtapose past and present without giving a priority to either one. Photographs are memory. Pictures of our younger selves, familiar places, friends and relatives attest our past, testify our existence. They put us into context, moor us down in time and space, and most of all reality. My computer-aided collages build on the formal qualities of the traditional photograph. However, by the power of the juxtaposition the context becomes only an illusion. The figures are all displaced, and we fall into the vertigo of our own temporality.
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