1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35

  • № 1–19:

    Graphite on Canson Barbizon paper
    15.3 x 10.6 inches (39 x 27 centimeters)
    2019–2020

    № 20–35:

    Graphite on Arches paper
    14 x 10 inches (35.5 x 25.4 centimeters)
    2020–2021

  • These drawings source imagery from American photographer Berenice Abbott’s series Documenting Science, created between 1939 and 1958, in which photographic exposures of light waves in water are captured with a patented ripple tank camera.

    As Abbott was at work on her photographic series, the United States entered into the frenetic blacklisting of McCarthyism at the onset of the Cold War. Both Abbott and the Photo League — a cooperative organization devoted to documentary photography to which she belonged — came under investigation by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee for communist affiliation and subversive activity. Abbott’s photographs were subsequently compiled in a physics textbook for public school curricula between 1958 and 1961 in a project for Scientific Illustrated and the Physical Science Study Committee. The images’ black-and-white undulations represent the interaction of physical and energetic forces, yet also recall processes of interference, evasion, and clandestine activity at play in public discourse and politics.

    By expanding on these images in new media, I hope to draw attention to the history of a photographer whose work extended the definition of documentation beyond the typical boundaries of documentary photography, and whose photographs subtly yet elegantly described the world — both physical and political — she found herself in. In activating overlooked and immaterial aspects of everyday space, the work also calls attention to the variety of waveforms (light, acoustics, and radio waves, for example) which permeate the air and pass through matter.

    In reiterating these forms, the work experiments with composition elements of interference, interplay, and layered light that is marked by the physical features and technological processes of Abbott's Super Sight reality: amplitude, troughs, frequency, repetition, and rhythmic, rippling surfaces.