Beauty Mask
Dodge and burn layers from atrocity photos.
Sundowning
An audio documentary on dementia.
Bedtime Stories
A collection of transcribed pornography.
sundowning
Sundowning is a 14-minute audio documentary concerning the experience of dementia care.
The project presents, without narration or commentary, a series of voicemail messages left by a 67-year-old man in the middle stages of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive disorder affecting memory, behavior, and language. The voicemails were left to his son over the span of a few days and are exhibited with the permission of his family.
Because of the voicemails’ repetitive intensity and the nature of what they reveal, a successful listening experience requires certain qualities of attention and submission. To encourage these, Sundowning exclusively exists within an exhibition format whose playback cannot be accelerated or otherwise controlled. To hear the project in its entirety, please dial the number below.
+1 (909) 978 - 7378
The project presents, without narration or commentary, a series of voicemail messages left by a 67-year-old man in the middle stages of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive disorder affecting memory, behavior, and language. The voicemails were left to his son over the span of a few days and are exhibited with the permission of his family.
Because of the voicemails’ repetitive intensity and the nature of what they reveal, a successful listening experience requires certain qualities of attention and submission. To encourage these, Sundowning exclusively exists within an exhibition format whose playback cannot be accelerated or otherwise controlled. To hear the project in its entirety, please dial the number below.
+1 (909) 978 - 7378
bedtime stories
bedtime stories
Beauty Mask
Beauty Mask
In photo editing, a technique called dodging and burning is used to artificially brighten and darken select areas of a photograph. Originating from the chemical darkroom, this practice is now accomplished digitally within programs such as Photoshop, where users can relight an entire image with a virtual paintbrush. Dodging and burning are particularly vital to fashion and product photography, where they are used to produce immaculate lighting, surfaces, and skin.
Given the immensity of what dodging and burning can do to an image, it is remarkable to find these techniques listed among the very few photo manipulations permitted under the ethics guidelines of The Associated Press. AP photojournalists are denied such basic tools as red eye removal and color correction, but they are nonetheless authorized to relight their images to “restore the authentic nature of the photograph.”
The significance of this permission is best observed in one particular photojournalistic staple: the atrocity image. With its Pulitzer-worthy photographs of war-ravaged landscapes and suffering children, this genre aims to horrify its viewers into sympathetic and political consciousness. However, a curious melodrama reveals itself when one recognizes that the soldier's face or the victim's corpse or the infant's emaciated rib cage has been contoured into chiaroscuro perfection by the same technology and visual grammar behind a swimwear portrait.
Beauty Mask is an attempt to inhabit the technical, psychological, and artistic demands of this branch of photo editing. In what can be called an act of kinesthetic learning, I spent several months in early 2022 applying the values, logic, and techniques of conventional beauty retouching to the most atrocious images I could find.
Presented here are not the final retouched images but rather their isolated dodge and burn layers. The original photographic subject has been removed for exhibition, and the digital brush strokes behind my compliant corrections and improvements have been rendered in white. Pinioned between inkblot and finger painting, each layer is now a final record of the ugliest parts of an ugly image.
Given the immensity of what dodging and burning can do to an image, it is remarkable to find these techniques listed among the very few photo manipulations permitted under the ethics guidelines of The Associated Press. AP photojournalists are denied such basic tools as red eye removal and color correction, but they are nonetheless authorized to relight their images to “restore the authentic nature of the photograph.”
The significance of this permission is best observed in one particular photojournalistic staple: the atrocity image. With its Pulitzer-worthy photographs of war-ravaged landscapes and suffering children, this genre aims to horrify its viewers into sympathetic and political consciousness. However, a curious melodrama reveals itself when one recognizes that the soldier's face or the victim's corpse or the infant's emaciated rib cage has been contoured into chiaroscuro perfection by the same technology and visual grammar behind a swimwear portrait.
Beauty Mask is an attempt to inhabit the technical, psychological, and artistic demands of this branch of photo editing. In what can be called an act of kinesthetic learning, I spent several months in early 2022 applying the values, logic, and techniques of conventional beauty retouching to the most atrocious images I could find.
Presented here are not the final retouched images but rather their isolated dodge and burn layers. The original photographic subject has been removed for exhibition, and the digital brush strokes behind my compliant corrections and improvements have been rendered in white. Pinioned between inkblot and finger painting, each layer is now a final record of the ugliest parts of an ugly image.
