brad

Old American people grew up in a world of objects- making them, trading them, working in stores touching them as they sell them. It’s not surprising that they think images are essentially real things, they’ve dealt with real objects their whole lives. To them images are billboards, advertisements in magazines, pictures in newspapers, and photographs are prints- these are tangible things. To me images are pop ups ads or .gifs on the side of Gawker- my digital news source that uses .jpegs to convey its stories, and whenever someone wants to show me photographs I go to their website. Images are not objects for my generation. If we really follow the Pictures Generation’s ideas to their logical conclusion we see that images as objects are just a bastardization of a bastardization. If we can agree that photographs are constructions not to be trusted, the most preposterous thing of all would be to try to assign a photograph the semi-permanence of physicality. I see this as a problem in the real world and in the art world, that Cindy Sherman’s criticisms on identity construction are contradicted by their being objects in metal frames screwed in to a wall. It makes more sense to present something that revolves around the idea of a visual illusion in a transient way. Just as a photograph starts as light projected on a sensor, that is the way I want my images to be seen- transient and intangible, never given the validity of a physical state an image never truly has in the first place. I also don’t believe objects will be objects for long.