Finding moments in the light
I take pictures of moments that never happened and landscapes that don’t exist using a smartphone camera, a light source, and an interlocutor - an object that sits in the light path and controls the light going into the lens through filtering, diffusion, diffraction, and reflection. Recent images have been shot with wrappers from candy and Scottish chocolate caramel wafer biscuits as well as labels reclaimed from food and drink.
These images are built up in a systematic way in the panorama function in the iPhone camera. The patterns created in the panorama application are ingested by the image processing system in the iPhone and output as images because the phone doesn’t know I am doing it wrong. The final image is partly controlled by the input data (color, light, and movement) and partly controlled by the software on the iPhone. This is best described as a form of generative photography.
About celadoor
The exploration of hardware with the goal of bending it to another purpose is at the center of my life, both personally, and as a core point of interest in my career. The tradition of generative photography is built on a similar repurposing of hardware and processes. Over the last ten years, my personal work has coalesced around the iPhone, creating works which exploit the gaps between the assumptions made by the designers of the computational photography processing in the iPhone’s camera, and the actions of this one particular user.
