Still

2012-2014

In Still, I capture archetypal travel photographs and rotate the bodies of the figures ninety degrees so that they lie horizontally within the image. When these bodies are repositioned, they become visible as both frozen and enduring, calling attention to the temporal paradox of photography. Their immobilized bodies, stiff and defiant of gravity, lie prone, their legs once in motion midstride now stuck rigidly up in the air and the billowing fabric of their clothing a solid and inflexible buttress propping up their bodies. In this horizontal state the bodies appear dead as if captured and preserved in the moment just after an unnamed event or disaster has occurred. It is unclear in these images whether the violent act that precipitated this death is the digital rotation of the figure in its frozen state or the original act of paralysis produced through the immobilizing capture of the body in film.