The work presented in these projects takes form in varying mediums. The intention of each project is to raise questions about photography and its relationship to art, or its purpose in visual culture at large. Drawing content from unlikely sources, each project uses its collected imagery together with a complimentary form of presentation to examine different concepts surrounding photography.
The Images in Best Buy, Union Square, were collected by secretly inserting a memory card into a display camera at the Union Square Best Buy in New York City. Instead of storing images taken by anonymous customers on the camera’s minimal internal memory (as display units typically do), the camera recorded them onto this card. Over three months, I collected hundreds of photographs by replacing the card daily and archiving the previous day’s images.
When showing this project, these candid snapshots are displayed as a slideshow on the same camera model used to create the images. The camera is attached to a security stand mounted on a waist-level 1’x1’ gallery pedestal to mirror the project's process further. Viewers are encouraged to pick up the camera, however the memory card is locked so no images can be added or erased.
Best Buy, Union Square is intended to raise questions about authorship, the transience of digital images, and the legality of photography when practiced in public and commercial spaces.
In 2012 I came across a Craigslist advertisement requesting a wedding photographer for $100. Intrigued by the small sum, I responded to the post. The couple engaged were both eighteen years old, and the groom was scheduled for deployment to Afghanistan soon after the wedding. I accepted the job. Immediately following my hire, I posted my own ad on Craigslist requesting a “second-shooter” who I would pay $100. Aside from the overwhelming number of negative -even threatening- responses I received, an eighteen-year-old high school student applied. I gave him the job.
On the day of the wedding I met my new assistant, who brought with him a small point-and-shoot camera and one 256 MB memory card. I instructed him to photograph whatever felt “natural”. A few days after the wedding, I provided the bride with a set of 100 images I had selected and edited from a group of over 1200 that I captured during the event. In return, I was given $100 in cash. I then met my assistant and exchanged the $100 for the photographs he had shot. Brian & Emily is a collection of all 148 images he provided me with, in chronological order, with no edits made to the original files.
The images are documentation of actions that provided a young couple with quality photographs of their wedding (I had previously worked many events as a photographer) and an ambitious amateur with experience and pay. While the pictures are mostly unremarkable, they are products of exploring the current state of wedding photography, the true subject of the project.
