All the light that (was) touched (by) you (2024 - 2025)
Variable dimensions. Plaster and soap.All the light that (was) touched (by) you is a series of cast works focused on the significance of snapshot photography in the early 20th century, and how the family album has shaped cultural understandings of memory.
Eastman Kodak democratized amateur photography through the family album, with the widespread success of the Brownie toy camera and their “you press the button we do the rest” motto that assured consumers of snapshot photography’s accessibility. Family albums were sold as a way to preserve memory, and less explicitly to prevent the loss of an individual even in death. The images themselves tend towards the same compositional formulas packaged and sold by Kodak. Because of this snapshot photographs appear functionally the same. However, there is a secondary record on the surface of a snapshot print that is entirely unique. It is written like fingerprints in the creases and folds and tears of the paper and emulsion. An incidental record grows on the surface of the print each time it is touched.
Roland Barthes writes about death and snapshot photography in Camera Lucida:
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder…over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
In All the light that (was) touched (by) you, “every photograph is this catastrophe” whether or not the image is there. As I hold a snapshot print of my great-grandmother I think of how we are connected through this photographic object by the transmission of light and touch - light briefly touches each subject before being focused through a lens and onto a light-sensitive piece of film, which has light passed through it and onto photographic paper to make a print. This light is visualized by the opalescent casts of the interior space of Brownie cameras, and images are erased in favour of evidences of touch by re-imaging photographs in plaster.
All the light that (was) touched (by) you is a gesture towards touch in a time when the dominant form of photography exists almost exclusively as fugitive strings of data. How do we hold memories and grief differently in a time when images are so abundant that they almost cease to exist?