Visible Light is a 70-page, 15 x 20 cm hardcover book scheduled for publication in April 2026 in a limited edition of ten intended for distribution to museums, libraries, and archives.
My relationship with photography began with family snapshots and pictures that I saw in magazines my parents subscribed to such as Life, Look, and The National Geographic. I became a collector of photographs when I discovered a small antique store across the street from my local public library where I spent hours as a teenager sifting through stacks of images that no one was interested in keeping or buying in a small upstate New York town back in the 1960s. Photo postcards could be had for a few pennies and stereograph cards of gristly scenes of the First World War in mint condition went for a nickel. Glass lantern slides and tintypes cost a little bit more. The afternoons I spent in this shop provided me with a window on the wider world and an initial aesthetic education. Later on I would discover many other types of photographic memorabilia at yard sales, secondhand bookstores, and flea markets wherever I travelled. I have carried these images and objects with me from one side of the Atlantic to another and still use much of this material in my work. Eventually I took my own photographs, studied photography seriously, worked with analog cameras in various formats, experimented with different darkroom techniques, fused photographic material into sculptures, and projected photographic images onto the walls of galleries. The emergence of digital media, the internet, and AI technology has changed my relationship with the medium in ways that never fail to surprise me and that I continue to explore.
Our notions of who we are as individuals, citizens, and human beings, of our own wellbeing, and of where we stand in relation to others are shaped and often distorted by the incessant barrage of images we take, view, and share via social media apps. A baby’s first photo is now usually an ultrasound scan made months prior to birth; security cameras give us the possibility of remotely watching a burglar enter our house, seeing it go up in flames or be inundated by flood waters and give others the possibility of monitoring our movements without our knowledge. Mobile phone photographs and videos taken by people we will never know make us witnesses to events occurring far away. A technology once the preserve of professionals and well-off amateurs is now widely accessible and used for everything from personal brand building to the documentation of human rights abuses.
Photographic images have been manipulated for a myriad of motives for as long as the medium has existed. When he wasn’t grappling with philosophic questions, Ludwig Wittgenstein created composite faces from the negatives of family portraits. Stalin made sure that the individuals he purged were airbrushed out of official photographs. Yves Klein didn’t really leap into the void. Evidence of the existence of arms of massive destruction purportedly documented in US intelligence photos of Iraq could not be confirmed in subsequent ground inspections. The human urge to tinker with or misinterpret what a camera has recorded is nothing new. What is different today is the ease and speed with which photographs can be altered or faked and the existence of multiple channels through which dubious images and narratives can be disseminated on a massive scale. Teenagers and presidents alike churn out memes that are shared by millions of other social media users–the more preposterous the better. Enterprising individuals intent on monetizing internet content use AI to produce maudlin fake images that gullible people in another part of the world believe are authentic. AI technology is being used by people curious to know what they would look like with a different haircut, after cosmetic surgery, or as a different gender.
Does every picture necessarily tell a story? Is every picture really worth a thousand words? What difference does it make if we talk about decisive moments in photography instead of images taken on the run? Is seeing still believing or are we progressively slipping towards what DARPA’s Matt Turek describes as a ‘zero-trust’ default perspective from which we assume that any photographic image may potentially be fake? Visible Light is a personal meditation on our evolving relationship with photographic images and the spectrum of technologies that have been used to produce them prior to and following the emergence of social media and artificial intelligence.
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