Guy Grabowsky

Photography, like technology, has always grappled with the human and its relation to mortality. Today we understand the world through images, whether photographic, religious, propagandistic, or advertorial, and through an ever-expanding variety of media. Images emerge and dissipate rapidly, functioning as a filter, lens, or screen through which we subjectively experience a hyperconstructed reality. The medium of photography exemplifies the contemporary gaze in its status as a means of documentation and its virtual or indexical relation to the subject or object it is documenting. Cataracts is an exploration of the conceptual and ontological complexities of this topic, informed by the insights of the critical theorists Charles Sanders Peirce, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes as well as contemporary reflections on photography by writers including Hito Steyerl.

The outcomes in Cataracts are the result of my effort to decode, deconstruct, and reinterpret the photographic image. Threading throughout is a meditation on the human in the postmodern 21st century. Here process is crucial not just as a method of production but as a means of conceptualization. Many of the photographs are the product of a journey through both digital and analog spaces. I brought together two distinct temporalities: human time, in the form of drawing and mark marking, using materials including tape and acrylic and employing expressionistic gestures and repeated minimalist motifs; and machine time, in the form of photographic technologies, including the camera or scanner. This navigation is a way of thinking about how images can be constructed.

The resulting photographs range from pictorial to abstract. They explore the ideas of slowness and cinema while reflecting upon themselves as ruins of the processes through which they were conceived.