I’ve been interested in the concepts and photographic practices of transparency, motion blur, positive/negative, and superimposition since studying at R.I.T.  Among my self-assignments at the time were photograms of magazine pages, book texts, and autumn leaves. In later years, I experimented from a different starting point: photographing moving television images, initially during the 2008 presidential election. The current pandemic situation, with it's 24/7 news coverage and commentary, offers up an endless supply of imagery as a resource. So I'm back at it.

My choice, for this project, is to digitally photograph a 4K screen straight-on and crop images to keep in the TV frame (reminding me of the days of filed-out negative carriers). Extended exposure times (measured  in seconds) allow purposeful motion blurs and superimposition, creating montages of a new sort; video producers present montages of their own, yielding straightforward, story-telling edits, and perhaps philosophical statements. My images, while derivative, exhibit new and expanded stories in a single frame. Sometimes wildly abstract but aesthetically pleasing, sometimes thoroughly documentary with or without words, these synthetic photographs are my pleasure both to capture and present.     

Source videos include live network television broadcasts, streaming internet presentations, and archived Youtube videos. Not limited to news presentations, images are also derived from commentaries, promotions, commercial advertisements, and entertainment programming. Unlike traditional reportage and most documentary photography, for this project I do often employ significant image enhancement techniques (using Adobe Lightroom Classic), though picture content is never changed. No compositing in Photoshop is done at all. I acknowledge the creative works (and copyrights) of original image makers and media producers, from which this creative documentary work is derived.

Photos appear newest to oldest. Click on the large picture to go to the full screen view or the small triangle to go to a slideshow. Thanks for visiting.  Paul