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STATEMENT

The pixel and the fingerprint. Two accidents come together.

In 2006 my Porsche designed Lacie hard drive containing thousands of digital image files stopped working. I used data retrieval software to salvage the content. Most of the files were fully recovered. A handful came back with the data dramatically scrambled, the original photographs rendered into a tapestry of digital mis-stitch. 

As a child, before becoming a photographer, I wanted to be a detective. I liked the idea of taking and relying on fingerprints. I liked making kits for uncovering fingerprints with charcoal dust. The fingerprint as identifier. This unique mark each human leaves behind. A mark whose structure follows the mathematics of the Fibonacci sequence. A mark that can incriminate or validate based on its arches, loops or whorls. A mark inextricable from the individual, yet having little, if nothing at all, to do with who one is.

In 2000 I was a student in San Francisco. I was preparing food in my kitchen apartment, cutting an orange, the knife slipped, and I sliced my finger. I ran water over the cut, cleaned it, held paper towel to it. It continued to bleed. Instead of immediately wrapping my finger, I found a tiny glass vial and held my finger over it. My blood dripped into the container. The cut finally clotted. I labeled the vial, put it away and forgot about it until 2006.

When my hard drive failed and I saw my corrupted digital photo files, I remembered the vial from 2000. I dug out the tiny bottle and made an ink by combining my salvaged blood with gum arabic. I used this ink to take my own fingerprints on ten separate pieces of rag paper. I selected and printed ten of the most dynamically corrupted photo files and paired them each with one my ten fingerprints.

The diptychs are titled to identify two things: the generic, software-derived name given each recovered corrupted file and the finger from which each print was made.

Ten Framed Works, 5 available
5 x 7 in. (mounted print)
16 x 19 in. (framed)
Edition of 1

EXHIBITION HISTORY

Views of Stillness, with Michael Massaia, Yamamoto Masao, and Kate Joyce, Obscura Gallery, Santa Fe, NM November 16, 2018 - January 5, 2019