Still Moving Moving Still installation at Epiphany Arts Center, Chicago, Illinois, January 2022.
22' x 17" inkjet print on Phototek 

Still Moving Moving Still

In conjunction with the Rod Slemmons Camera Archive and the Chicago Cluster Project, we were given the opportunity to choose an historic camera from the collection and create a project. We chose an 1893 Kodak BullsEye #2 — the handheld, inexpensive, snapshot camera of its day — to journey into photographic history. Intervening with 21st century upgrades and film, we revived this antique photographic tool, embracing the glitches and discombobulations as records of time.

To look through an obsolete camera is to reflect upon the layering of human histories. Retrofitting the camera to function with contemporary film created overlapping exposures and unpredictable intervals as we repeatedly photographed the flowing, historic Milwaukee River, rich with its own histories of use and overuse. Re-photographing the developed analog film negative with a hand-held iPhone in panorama mode resulted in images of wavering focus and undulations of distance and movement. This spatial and temporal process evokes the ebb and flow of human mediation on the landscape as well as on the medium that continues to record our imprint.