Fugue State speaks to my concern for how the tangible photograph, one you can hold in your hands and experience viscerally, may be entirely lost to the generations to come. I observe my children, part of the most documented generation in history, create thousands of images for their social media outlets but am painfully aware that they have never made a single photographic print; they will most likely have no physical photographs to pass down to their children and grandchildren. This loss of the photograph-as-object, as something actual and concrete to be circulated across time, from the past into the future, reflects how specific memories and identities will fade and disappear—we are experiencing a loss of cultural and familial histories in the forms that we have so long associated with the Archive writ large.
 
The photographs created for this series, composed of two distinct bodies of related and interconnected images, hold/occupy a space between past and future to demonstrate this tension between imagistic and material states.
 
I make analog portraits of the people in my life using a 1960’s Rolleiflex camera. After developing the film traditionally, I work to damage the emulsion of my negatives—with water, as well as with bleach and other chemicals found in household cleaning supplies—to literally wound the film. I then scan the negative into the digital darkroom, keeping the image inverted, to make these injuries more visible, so that the latent potential for both erasure and restoration are present in the photograph. In harming my images, and therefore my legacy, I am marking and calling attention to this dramatic paradigm shift from what is physical to what is visual.

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