Photography’s continued search for identity and the freedom to use photographic materials is a core interest in my work.

I recall attending a lecture given by a Art Papers contributing writer where we the audience were told that there was no such thing as modernist photography; that modernism didn't work on photography and that modernist photography would have to be something like pictures of a darkrooom or a photograph of an enlarger. The art historian continued, “Problems like these were in fact a contributing factor to the downfall of Modernism because Modernism didn’t ‘work’ on all areas of art.”

Academic misunderstandings like these seem to be a contributing factor in the beginning of the end of a period of photographic discovery that did indeed include a few modernists artists like László Moholy-Nagy and his photograms.

How and why did we reach a place where being considered a photographer became so taboo that artists like Joseph Kosuth went to great lengths to ensure that their work was classified as conceptual art and not photography, with a clear understanding that the degrees of separation of these artistic practices could never be reconciled. How did we go from the utopian, mystical practices of Moholy-Nagy to complete taboo? Academic and artistic trends fueled the fire of misunderstandings like these throughout the 70’s and 80’s and are at the very heart of photography’s search for identity in the critical art world and the medium's struggle to not be reduced to the post-modern equivalent of mere images.

One of the most telling accounts of photography’s search for identity and therefore in some cases over compensation of identity is found in Words Without Pictures where in Walead Beshty's essay Abstracting Photography uses the element of time in photography to give it the power and relevance it needs to stake its claim in the critical art world. Beshty quotes Louis Althusser's essay “Picturing” noting “When photographs are treated as mere images a parallel confusion occurs for photographs are after all present in all four dimensions. ”A fundamental problematic occurs here with hierarchies like this in place. For in Duchampian philosophy it makes no difference whether the negative is in fact the only medium that holds the fourth dimension (time) captive in its celluloid snaky skin because the viewer completes the work in time and therefore all art works exist in or are completed in the fourth dimension.

The asseration that a place is held for photography in the critical art world because photography is the only medium that exists within the fourth dimension is faulty and dangerous. Ideas like these leave photography unable to advance. If such strict scientific rhetoric was still used to validate sculpture artists would still be working exclusively with marble with the intention to create the perfect representation of the pubescent male body.

But we are not. Now that technology has arrived at such a point where we can scan a human body and recreate a perfect physical representation then there is no dire need to keep producing marble sculptures of pubescent male bodies unless you are planning on doing something interesting with it. We must let go of the idea that time is the God particle that gives photography its critical relevance in the art world and open it up to all its fertile potential.

Taking this into account, I have allowed myself to think about photography as a medium that uses materials. Thus, I began to realize that Photoshop is a great material, a ubiquitous tool of everyday image making. It’s a tool that is shunned as well as exalted very much in the same vein as the celebrity portraits and editorials that it is commonly used to manipulate. These gradients and gradients portraits consider darkroom practices and Photoshop practices as one in the same. It is my goal to use the materials that photography affords us as artists to its full advantage and to re-evaluate the power of photographic material as an art form while letting go of the idea that it is exclusively the element of time that gives the medium its relevance. Time is not the God particle that makes photography relevant in the critical art world, just as it is not the brush that makes a painting relevant.