Christopher Russell

The Falls

Immediacy is Photography's greatest asset; the way photography interacts with our lived experience of the world sets it apart from other visual media. Yet the conventions of the medium elevate its illusionistic quality, focusing on trompe l'oeil–confusion between the subject and its representation. Traditionally, photographer's have obsessed over dust and scratches, manipulating errant lighting in the darkroom, to create an image as flawless as the smooth surface of coated paper. But I've come to think of photography as a medium that accepts the blunt line of the hand as a shock to this surface uniformity, creating interplay between the immediacy of the hand and that of photography.

            Traditionally, individual photographs are understood primarily as narrative. Relationships between figures or objects are understood by speculating on what might have brought them together in the camera’s frame or what might have happened in the moments after. It's this secondary interpretation, photography's malleable narrative life, that I'm calling attention to with my razor-drawings.

            I use an action that is undesirable to photographers. In defacing the photograph, it becomes a Postmodern substrate for Romantic thought. I identify as a photographer, however I explore the medium through fictional texts, drawings and photographs. I mess up the clean reproducibility of the mechanically reproduced image with an X-acto blade, scratching elaborate patterns into the surface of my photographs. The razor-drawings appear delicate from a distance, but become textured marks of controlled, yet violent motions upon closer inspection.