Now...This (2006) Oil and acrylic on eighteen individual gesso panels 20cm x 30cm x 2.5cm each. Total size variable
Eighteen snapshot images painted in oil and acrylic on gesso panels. Many of the images are painted reproductions of photographs that were donated as part of a project concerning the demise of conventional 'analogue' photography in the digital age.
As a starting point, influenced by my working methods with film, I had the idea of using found imagery bringing in an element of chance and working from images that each had their own self-contained narrative. The format would be uniform and set so the final results could be arranged in different configurations.
I sent a call out requesting photographs but with the stipulation that I was only interested in those that people had considered to be mistakes; the photos that hadn’t turned out, where heads were cropped, colours over-exposed, etc., in many ways, photographs that people simply hadn’t got round to throwing away.
The response was huge and the conversation I had started brought some amazing stories and insights. As a result I amassed a varied (and sometimes bizarre) selection of images that spanned many decades.
I became fascinated with the idea of these photographs capturing a moment, perhaps insignificant, sometimes by accident, and what these particular images could tell us about how we see ourselves, how we document our lives and what of our past we choose to preserve. A moment recorded, albeit in error, revealing much about small aspects of a life lived - recorded at a level of detail deemed insignificant enough to throw away.
To me these became important images in their own right, images that, with the advent of digital photography, the ‘re-touched’ photographs of glossy magazines, and the knowing self consciousness of the Facebook era, would either not exist in the first place or would be erased at the point of shooting for being less than perfect.
Oliver Cross, Yorkshire Evening Post, Friday 9th July 2010
