PROOF: EVIDENCE OF A POSSIBLE NARRATIVE

Photography makes us privy to places that we have never been, events we have not experienced and people we’ve never met. A photograph can serve as proof of something we have not witnessed ourselves. And yet with all its persuasiveness as visual evidence it remains a fragment in time and space, an incomplete record from which we must draw our own conclusions. In my recent series, Proof: Evidence of a Possible Narrative, I replace my camera’s lens with a peephole and use it as a visual device to imply an act of surveillance, positioning the viewer as an after-the-fact witness, a kind of detective in search of meaning. I focus my lens on natural and manmade objects—lost or found—placed in my own yard or at the edge of a nearby woods, and present them as evidence marking the intersection of the human and natural worlds. By enlarging the peephole image—one that combines extreme close-ups with wide-angle perspectives—the photographs suggest an expansive landscape when in fact my images reveal the small, disappearing overgrown and wild spaces that have survived the encroaching sprawl of neatly manicured suburbia. Each sequence reveals distorted views of various objects or creatures as circumstantial evidence or clues to some imperceptible event that happened just outside our usual angle of view—the forensic aesthetic of television’s CSI meets the foreboding folk tales of the Brothers Grimm. The arrangement of the photographs in a triptych sequence invites multiple interpretations, and considers the veracity of the photographic image as evidence in solving a mystery or crime as well as how it can be manipulated to generate a fiction. How do we determine a falsehood from a fact? What is the relationship between the photograph and what it represents? How does the observer construct meaning from images and experience? Exploring the narrative potential of photography, Proof considers the woods as a place of mystery, refuge and fear, and confronts our feelings of connection to and estrangement from the realm of nature.