Where am I? I feel the warmth of the sun. I see shadows move through my field of vision. I hear birdsong, footsteps, and the faint hum of cars. I’m inside. The sun is setting. I’m outside. A reflection of dazzling light catches my eye and I’m reminded of the beauty that surrounds me. Time isn’t frozen, but the sphere of my perception is at once completely perceivable and magically ephemeral. The world shines in echoes of past experiences. Where was I?
Light catches my attention frequently; its refractions and reflections are the most important component of my photography. I used the word dazzling earlier very intentionally; it describes light that temporarily blinds or confuses one’s vision. The physics of light is a well documented science, without which photography would not be possible, but there is a more spiritual and emotional aspect to the way we see light. To use a camera, a tool of science, to capture abstract visions bridges the gap between the two viewpoints. Author Bruce Watson bridges that same gap when he describes Paul the Apostle’s revelatory vision on the road to Damascus as a “photism”; a synesthetic reaction to overwhelming light. This leaves room for light to be described scientifically, but acknowledges the effect that light can have as a personal experience outside the realm of science. When light catches my eye, I feel drawn to photograph it. As a photographer, my whole practice revolves around the curation and admiration of light. My art is the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice, and light is my deity.
We all have moments where we inhabit meditative, potentially revelatory states, whether we recognize it or not. They become easier to perceive the more we acknowledge them. In Zen Buddhism, koans serve the purpose of sparking profound meditation that urges one towards enlightenment, but they are only effective on those who have an experienced discipline of meditation. Outside of Zen tradition, koans spread for their riddle-like phrasing. Purposefully nonsensical wording leaves the standard observer in either a state of wonder or confusion. Like koans, I think of my photographs not as commands to meditate but rather opportunities.
Our individual experiences of the world, as much as they can be conveyed, are more often connected by difference than by likeness. Taking a photograph is supposed to be a way to share experiences, but these photographs instead prompt introspection. The imagery projects beyond the frame into the space of memory. These photographs, these moments, are states between states; when your vision blurs and you find yourself thinking, “where am I?”.
Far from where I began
an unknown distance from where I’ll be
Can I see either of those points
from where I am now
Visualizing the present is difficult enough
my place in it, my path through it
I find myself caught off guard
constantly refocusing
like eyes adjusting to changes in light
If I look through a window
a door
a mirror
am I seeing into my life
or out of it
When I look back at photos from my childhood, I'm amazed at how much of my current personality I see in my younger self; in these six photos I stare into my eyes and recognize the face gazing back. Working in the Gum Bichromate process, each layer of color I print gives me an opportunity to reflect on the memories they evoke. I devote time to these photographs otherwise abandoned in family albums rarely opened or left on floppy disks to vanish due to bit rot. They're artifacts of my personality and reminders that I've always been optimistic, inquisitive, awkward, and queer; I've always been me.
Originally shown at the South Bend Museum of Art’s LGBTQ+ Exhibition, November - December 2023
Rural spaces are seen as inhospitable by many gay men. For those queer individuals who don’t desire big city life, rural towns and communities can have certain appeal, yet never encompass one’s entire being. Alexis Annes and Meredith Redlin outline in their 2012 article “Coming Out and Coming Back: Rural Gay Migration and the City” that gay men from rural communities often express the importance of urban spaces and communities, but rarely feel entirely comfortable in them. There is an acknowledgement, then, that neither space is wholly reflective of their lived experiences. They, and those like them, are in a liminal existence; they exist in between spaces, driven by a desire for an environment that feels like home.
If you are longing for something out of reach, are you truly experiencing the world around you? Are you living in the moment? Floating around, drifting perpetually with no immediate sense of belonging, one becomes a ghost.
Made in collaboration with Jacob Lehmann at the Kylemore Global Centre Artist Residency, July of 2023.
Is your memory “photographic”? If someone claims to have a photographic memory, they generally mean that they can recall specific details of events they have experienced. Do they see those details as a vision frozen in time?
When it comes to media that represents memory and time, film and photography are seen as different ends of a spectrum. Film represents time through many subsequent moments while photography shows one isolated slice of time. Neither of these conventions represent the way I experience memories. While I can often recall details of the important sights and sounds of my day-to-day life, I know that they are not objective. My memories don’t appear as a single moment, clearly preserved, nor do they play in my mind’s eye like a detached viewing experience. Time and space become subjective recollections once you’re no longer directly observing them.
In my project, “Collected Recollection: This Picture Is Not One Moment”, I capture moments closer to how I remember the world. With my photos, I seek to convey memories as fragmented points in time rather than a filmic progression of events.
How do memories pass down from one generation to the next? Very few people take the time to write their memories down, especially memories from early childhood. A written account may be the most detailed way to capture a memory in hindsight but every memory is corrupted by subjectivity and time. When we hear our parents describe aspects of their childhood, we have to take their word for it. These secondhand memories float at the back of our minds; we learn them without recording them ourselves, so they become another layer half-remembered by our own faulty recollection. Secondhand stories are little more than anecdotes to the receiver. What visuals could we attach to them?
What do family photos mean to us? As I began to sort through the great mass of prints, slides, and negatives in the old boxes that are now in my possession, I saw glimmers of events that called out to me. It was a feeling of nostalgia. My nostalgia, however, is not for the event depicted in the photo but for the memory of having the story relayed to me by those who experienced it. By printing these photos in the gum bichromate process, I turn this feeling of nostalgia and half-remembrance into a unique physical object. No print can exist without showing my own influence, mistakes, and artistry through this handmade process, just as no memory can be free from subjectivity.
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Memories of Memories was first displayed in Montana State University’s Exit Gallery in April of 2021.
Fall, my favorite season, is quite difficult to capture in Montana. Winter comes early or Summer stays late; either one means that Fall doesn’t get its time in the spotlight. In 2020, I tried to capture the proper Autumn feeling with my 4x5 pinhole camera. These contact prints, toned in thiocarbamide, serve as little objects to remind me of my favorite time of the year.
Do you know how much trash you accumulate? We all, generally, go through a lot of trash in a day, most of it plastic that will outlive us in one way or another. All of these objects have a life cycle, or at least an expected one. They’re designed by a person or a marketing firm, manufactured in a factory, used by someone, and then either recycled or sent to a landfill. But what if, instead of being a normal cog in this machine, I interrupted its lifecycle? In a way, these plastic, machine made objects are already immortal, but now they’ve been briefly transformed into art objects, a type of second immortalizing. These objects will now exist on two paths: their normal life cycle and the alternate universe of the art object. In this series, the mundane has become the meaningful.
I chose to do these photograms all with white light, focusing on the form of the objects and playing with the negative space. Using all white light gave the prints the aesthetic quality of an x-ray of sorts. This adds to the theme of examining the trash in our personal lives. It also helped unify the pieces with a distinctly warm, unified color palette. Some objects were directly on paper, while others were in the enlarger to provide variety in the scale of the objects.
My final project for intermediate photography. Todd L. Abelmann is a character study where I played both photographer and subject.
