Kodachromes: June '73,
2020
3-min multi-channel installation.
The vernacular snapshot is often seen to offer an unmediated truth; its omnipresence helps to form the compelling case for the photograph as a “message without a code”, as Barthes once put it 1.
Kodak’s mass-market revolution left almost no trace of the photograph’s precedented relationship with death and family album editing, and instead, paved the way for the chronologically displayed ‘Kodak moments’ we’re now familiar with.
Kodachromes: June ‘73 grounds itself as a reader of found imagery previously forming part of an anonymous family archive in the form of 35mm Kodachrome transparency slides dated June of 1973.
Direct, visible intervention in the form of mixed-media collage constructs new, pending moments out of precedented photographic ‘truth’. And ultimately, shed light on the construction of narratives inherent in the act of photographing.
Thereby, the work rejects the snapshot (and the photographic medium) as unmediated representation ground by nature, even in its most transparent and honest form: direct film transparency projection.
Each burst of light and sound fight for the viewer’s gaze in a rhythmic audio-visual experience. The inability to distinguish the constructed from the real invites viewers to piece together the narrative rebus using the same perceptional fluidity one uses to make sense of reality.
1. A concise exposition of this argument can be found in pages 15-31 of: Barthes, R. (1977) Image Music Text. ed. by Heath, S. London: Fontana Press.