Hand Pulled Silver Gelatin Print | 50cm x 50cm | Edition of 8 + 2 Artists Prints | 2013-2015
Estate is a series of photographs of negatives. These negatives were purchased in Denmark, and are almost certainly the vacation photos of a Danish family sometime around World War II. This is all the information we have about them.
I taped these negatives up on a sheet of plexiglass and photographed them in Northern Italy, at and around the now famous vacation destination, Lake Garda.
By shooting the negatives on slide film (thus making my own positive) and then enlarging this positive in the darkroom, the resulting picture is in negative of real life. Sky becomes dark, shadows become highlights, it is a classic aesthetic. But the negative being held up in the image is also reversed, resulting in a positive image. The present is reversed and in a way nullified, and the past returns to the forefront, becoming the focus. There is zero digital manipulation of these images, they are all photographed on location.
Estate means a property one owns or a legal position in English. In Italian it means summer.