Palimpsest

A Palimpsest is a surface stripped of its original text and re-inscribed with a different text--with new ideas. The substrate for this project is a sixty five page chapter that I was compelled to remove from my dissertation as it neared completion--a difficult and painful experience. The analysis of authors who connect photography to the discourse of vision contained in the chapter was, and remains a foundational part of how I understand the making and viewing of photographs. The rising and falling influence of the ideas expressed by those authors is itself a palimpsestic process. Ideas are committed to paper and gain credence only to be covered over by the theories that follow and replace them. Palimpsest is a photographic project that acknowledges this process. It begins with a sheet pulled from the stack of edited pages from my dissertation. At first I physically scraped the surface of these pages with a razor blade removing the text to prepare the surface for re-use. A photograph of a ‘real-world’ palimpsestic surface was then printed onto the sheet. As the process progressed, I allowed digital processes to take over, and I experimented with overlaying one text onto another in digital editing software to remove sections and prepare the surface for the new image. Whether physical or virtual, Palimpsest explores the ways in which ideas and texts underlie all understandings of photography though they are often invisible and frequently obscured and altered by the technologies, images, ideas that follow.