MAMMAL THOUGHTS

BASTIEN DESFRICHES DORIA

CHICAGO, IL, USA

ARTIST INTERVIEW

ARTIST STATEMENT

This series explores the questioning of bodily identity interweaved with philosophical reflection (Cartesian Cogito). It is composed of thirteen large format portraits, involving a collaborative dialogue between author and the subject.

I allowed each individual to re-appropriate his/her own particular understanding of bodily representation through absurdity, absence, humor or eroticism to genuinely transcribe what one felt when asked to pose as a body.

The series evolves along the impossibility of depicting the human figure as a material being, both philosophically and photographically: neither the “objective” witness (the photographer), nor the subjective performer (the portrayed individual who tries to embrace the reality of being just a body in front of the camera) can successfully picture (no)body, that is the experience of looking at person’s body as a living, concrete entity separated from his/her identity. In that specific sense, my series constitutes a direct attempt to photograph the reality of what Merleau-Ponty defined as Body Subjects.

But by doing so, this work essentially questions our traditional discrimination between mind and body inherited from Western Metaphysics, and even more crucially our inherent immaterial relationship with physicality in an age of global communication and omnipotent visualism. In this respect, the raw meat laid out in each portrait symbolically manifests both the intention of the subject’s thoughts and of the photographer’s narrative, while brutally confronting the photographic representation’s failure to grasp one of the most fundamental human evidence.

CYANOTYPE & SALT PRINTS

PAUL KARABINIS

JACKSONVILLE, FL, USA

ARTIST INTERVIEW

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a photo historian, I have a keen interest in early practitioners who understood photography as a hybrid printmaking process that relied upon light sensitive chemicals instead of
etching acids and inks. While my initial exploration of historical processes was little more than a technical exercise, I was quickly attracted to the serendipitous aspects of the handmade
photographic print. It is virtually impossible to coat the sensitizer with precise consistency from print to print or to predict exactly how the final print will look. In a medium
heavily based upon standardization of materials, preparing and printing on my own photographic paper became a welcome relief to the predictable and uniform look of the traditional
photographic print.

Most recently, I have introduced digital techniques to the production of negatives used with historical processes. If the computer was initially little more than a technical aid that
hastened the making of a negative, it has become an indispensable part of how I visualize my pictures. Most significant is how the computer has transformed my understanding of
photography from an act defined by a split second at a given aperture, to an open-ended process with unlimited visual possibilities. To put it another way: I use the camera to take
photographs and the computer to make pictures. This distinction may seem trivial in a post-photographic era but it has broadened my understanding of how a photograph can be
made, how it can look, and how it can function as a picture.

My current work revolves around tabletop collages composed of preexisting pictures (film, digital, and drawn) in combination with three-dimensional objects and a preference
for backlighting. Through attention to how scale can be manipulated by vantage point, object size, and juxtaposition of foreground/background, I search for that wonderful ambiguity
that results when reality is seen as representation and fact begins slouching towards symbol.

All photographs are printed on Arches Platine or 140# Aquarelle hot press paper. Print sizes are approximately 12.5 x16.5 inches matted/framed to 20x24 inches. Most images exist in multiples of three and may be available as salt, cyanotype, and toned cyanotype prints. No two prints from the same negative are exactly alike.

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