touch me
hand-coloured gelatine silver prints on fiber paper
2009
An exploration into the dualities of intimacy and distance, touch and vision, technology and the body, the machine and the handmade, sex and sterility, safety and disease; the photographs in this project accentuate the tensions between each of these dualities. The analogue gelatine silver prints, printed from negatives shot with a 4 x 5" film camera, depict close-up views of homemade gay porn playing on a computer monitor, each pixel visible to the eye. The columns of burnt out pixels on the monitor have been hand-tinted back in, revisiting a historical photographic tradition most commonly used to lend naturalness, warmth, to colourless images, usually portraits or landscapes, but here the tradition is perverted, foregrounding the technology that lies between the viewer and the depicted, rather than lending warmth to the scene. The cropped focus on hands makes the circumstances of each image almost indecipherable, contributing further to the tension between a sense of alienation and of graphic intimacy, in a meditation on the body in the computer age, and the queer body in the age of AIDS.
hand-coloured gelatine silver prints on fiber paper
2009
An exploration into the dualities of intimacy and distance, touch and vision, technology and the body, the machine and the handmade, sex and sterility, safety and disease; the photographs in this project accentuate the tensions between each of these dualities. The analogue gelatine silver prints, printed from negatives shot with a 4 x 5" film camera, depict close-up views of homemade gay porn playing on a computer monitor, each pixel visible to the eye. The columns of burnt out pixels on the monitor have been hand-tinted back in, revisiting a historical photographic tradition most commonly used to lend naturalness, warmth, to colourless images, usually portraits or landscapes, but here the tradition is perverted, foregrounding the technology that lies between the viewer and the depicted, rather than lending warmth to the scene. The cropped focus on hands makes the circumstances of each image almost indecipherable, contributing further to the tension between a sense of alienation and of graphic intimacy, in a meditation on the body in the computer age, and the queer body in the age of AIDS.