Resident Alien. Part 6.
I remember an interview with Brian Eno once where he was talking about how the charm of each new technology will be remembered by the limitations inherent in it and it will be these flaws which will give that technology its own unique signature. For example; vinyl by its crackles and scratches, film by its grain, tapes by their background hiss, video by its colour bars and digital by its glitching artifacts. These imperfections which we spend our time today trying to iron-out or side-step are actually the very essence of a medium and, in retrospect, will be seen as part of the unique beauty that came from working with it. These limitations will give the medium its texture which will lend itself to a project's final realization. This texture will then become the baseline reading we associate with an authentic experience of it.
I was excited to be shooting with my new digital Leica (a D-Lux 3) and without the burden of film, processing or expense I was led away by my own enthusiasm with my camera set to program. I only needed to point, compose and shoot and this felt liberating and pure. I had been photographing for over a year this way and when I sat down to edit the work I really did not know what I was doing. I damaged many of my original image files by saving horrifically edited images over the top of them. Even when I did later learn some things, I actually decided to keep the same camera settings with the rationale of staying consistent, telling myself jpegs were the equivalent to working in 35mm anyway and I’d change the settings to something else when my Greencard arrived.
Doing this has in fact now bound this work together as a single entity and sacrificing some resolution for consistency over time has worked for it. With the projects clear parameters, it spanned 4 years and my entire immigration process. While the US department of homeland security investigated me, I investigated the US with my camera. The photos I made were my attempt to establish a context for myself psychically in my new country of residence while the government attempted to determine my presence legally. Although none of these actual facts about the collection are directly depicted in any single photo, they are nevertheless, for me, an integral part of its psychological profile, the secret narrative below everything, its code..
With a primary jpeg colour palette and the vision field compressed by the even light of flash, I composed pictures using bright or clear forms on the camera's small LCD screen which was held mostly at arm's length. This was a first for me and I framed the world already flattened and rendered by technology, rather than through a viewfinder where it was my own perception and the theatre of “reality” playing out inside the frame. Subject and composition were my only concern now and with seemingly unlimited memory I could afford to indulge any photo-notion that arose along the way and I consider this whole period between 2008-2012 as a joy-filled photographic experiment. Today, when I view this collection it reminds me of an epic graphic novel that has been cut up into all its individual panels then mixed together and it was now my job to reassemble it into a coherence that is still yet to be determined.
