My connection to photography has more critical roots, as I often find it to be disappointingly flat, manipulative, and exclusively ocular. But until recently, most of my projects were not photographic in nature. Since those initial encounters with the topic, surveillance imagery, dataveillance and machine vision have continued to be a central focus of my work. Noelle Mason: After reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and taking a theoretical class about surveillance during my undergraduate studies, I became increasingly interested in concepts surrounding surveillance. LensCulture: What are your earliest memories of photography’s impact on your creativity? Were you working in other mediums, or did you always have a special connection with photography specifically? Any pixellation seen in this image is an artifact from the source image archive. Cyanotype on watercolor paper of people being smuggled across the US/Mexico border illegally. We caught up with the artist to discuss how her interest in vision technologies began, and why she thinks it’s important to stray from traditional uses of photography to tell this important story to the world.īackscatter Blueprint (Los Tristes). In her submission, Mason included two chapters from this project, titled Backscatter Blueprint and Ground Control. Invisibility, was selected as the First Place Winner in this year’s LensCulture Art Photography Awards. The multimedia project, titled X-Ray Vision vs. Intrusive x-rays from Border Patrol are printed as cyanotypes, referencing the technical foundation of photography, and are then brought together with hand-woven tapestries that depict areas of conflict at the US-Mexico border-photographs originally made by a satellite. Searching through online databases of digital images, including “backscatter” x-ray photographs, she appropriates seemingly mundane, technical shots and develops them into her own unique pieces. In order to overcome the limitations of these classic stylings, artist Noelle Mason creates a different type of visual work to address the lived experience of undocumented immigrants in the USA. We consume photography on a given topic, only to push it aside and forget about the story as we move onto the next. But the problem with this format is that it often becomes so internalized that we barely react to the images, dulling their intended impact. For over a century, photojournalism and documentary photography have provided us with an immediately legible visual rundown of international stories, from political events to natural disasters. The traditional photo essay is something we often search for to inform ourselves on global news.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |