Representations: Photos by Cynthia Greig
Conceptual photos that reduce objects to their basic forms—devoid of color or labels, flat lighting, and simple charcoal outlines—that deny the viewer's usual expectations of consumer culture.
My series of photographs, Representations, explores the concept of photographic truth and its correspondence to perceived reality. As a kind of playful homage to William Henry Fox Talbot’s treatise, The Pencil of Nature, the images combine color photography and drawing to create what I like to call photographic documents of three-dimensional drawings. I start by collecting everyday objects from the recent past—things made obsolete by technological changes and time; I then whitewash them with ordinary house paint as a method of erasure, and then draw directly onto their surfaces with charcoal to create visual hybrids that appear to vacillate between drawing and photography, black-and-white and color, signifier and signified, copy and original. No digital manipulation is involved, but the camera’s monocular point of view is imperative.