A 2015–2018 series interrogating the visual archive of Life Magazine — figures looking back on themselves as the newsprint yellows with time
2015 – 2018
Exhibited: Project Gallery, Toronto · CONTACT Photography Festival, May 2018
Works: 47 pieces · prints, collage, mixed media
Year: 2015 – 2018
While all images carry baggage, Life Studies looks into that of one of the most iconic journals of documentary photography, Life Magazine — informing decades of photographers and helping to create an aesthetic for the documentary image. The series' source material was found in issues of the magazine that worked their way into libraries and used book stores after their original distribution. Disrupting these images, the body of work creates figures that look back on themselves, many taken from the same page of multiple copies of the same issue. The figures look on at their own aging process as the newsprint is slowly yellowed by time, providing a subtle memento mori. These newer images retain much of their original's information, only in an altered state, often leaving their previously intended context indistinguishable.