>>Taken From the SNICHOVAULT<< Retrospective Time!

Now that I'm starting to get the layout of this blog more to my liking, I think it's time to look back at some of my older images. I might as well start with this one because it was my first "Oh Wow" moment as an artist. It's hard to know where you're going as an artist until you have one of those moments. After this picture I started to try to make others like it, which led me to the style of photography I swing today.



I must've made this in 2007. It was taken in my back patio in direct sunlight, couldn't tell you much other specs about it,  more than likely it was shot on Kodak TMAX 100 film. Back then I lacked a whole lotta knowledge about what it was I was doing. Still, I was ambitious to make something that stood out from all the pictures of street signs and pets that my peers would subject me into looking at. I started using multiple negatives and multiple enlargers, and back then there was a lot of wasted paper trying to line two enlargers up to expose a seamless(ish) image. This picture was a product of improvisation, and involved a lot of going in and out of the darkroom, making little tweaks and changes to my negatives. After hours of tweaking, this is what I came up with. It changed the way I thought, the way I approached photography.

My image was spewed from the mind of an ignorant artist, but I'm sure fans of photography would find similarities in Joel Peter Witkin's (b.1939) work. Except while I prefer to deconstruct my subject using paint and ink, he makes things easier and instead uses pre-dead corpses. Let's compare!

This is "Le Baiser" from 1982. It's quite gnarly. If you couldn't guess it's an image of a severed old man's head cut down the middle and turned to kiss itself. It was kind of strange for me to make my picture and have people say, "Have you seen Witkin's stuff? Your stuff reminds me of his a lot!" And then I see this. Not that I mind, but a split corpse head in a masterbatorial makeout sesh wasn't exactly on my mind when I was making my picture. But whatever, Witkin rules so I'll take it.

This one has even more in common with my picture. It's called "Harvest (Death Mask)" and it's from 1984. You can see in this one how he too went at his negative, scratching that frame into the image. It's cool how two people from different parts of America in different generations can have such similar ways of thinking. Although I definitely prefer my methods of using glue and paint over that of his morbid techniques.

www.witkins.whatever