Description of Work

Who Ran The Iron Horse - 2021 - Photographic Installation - giclée and gelatin-silver prints - Not for Sale

Artist's Statement

Having lived in northwest Ohio from an early age, I have an odd relationship to what I choose to photograph, often feeling detached yet defined by its setting. Photography is a way in which I can see past the fog of my own familiarity, and communicate with what is pictured and myself. These vernacular subjects serve as vehicles in which to document my own process of evaluating a place I've known as home. This body of work is an attempt to reconcile the history and culture of a place that I feel largely detached from as well as profess my fondness for it’s irregularities. Autochthonous artifacts like rusting metal geese mounted on the wall of a carry-out or a crucifix like shadow cast upon a church’s rooftop are beautiful to me yet foreboding. It is in this way that I hope these photographs may contain both irony and sincerity. Their agency to represent love and discontent, sometimes simultaneously seems to be this dissonance between self and place that is so well perpetuated in middle America.    

Photographing with a 4x5 view camera or 6x9 medium format, the camera sits between me and what's photographed with blunt obviousness. I am not sneaking or avoiding the interaction. I am engaging with it in a way that allows me to have a genuine dialogue with a place I often felt I could not access. Embracing conceptual and formal differences is a key component to my artistic practice. Influenced by the Regionalist Photographers of the 1930s and the Color Photography movement of the 1970s, my current artistic practice explores the integration of black & white and color photography as well as the integration of large format, medium format, and 35mm. I am interested in the expressive possibilities afforded by the constructive nature of the view camera along with the spontaneity of the smaller formats. Allowing their conceptual and formal differences to converse seems important in creating a singular voice within a body of work, or at least a harmony; fitting for its somewhat suburban, somewhat rural, melody.

If you wish to purchase any of these pieces, please contact the gallery director, Jacqueline Nathan (jnathan@bgsu.edu.)