Land scape
Stephen Chen
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
I could not figure out how I could represent these moments such that people“ got it”- they just looked like“ bad” photos.
At around the same time, I began experimenting with false-color infrared photography, mainly because I had an unused digital camera lying around that I could convert. I never felt an affinity to digital photography before because I loved the element of chance in darkroom work – you never quite know how your pictures are going to turn out. You could control all the variables to get consistent results, but that would take away the fun of discovery and happy“ accidents”. I liked that what was displayed on the screen in digital infrared did not represent the outcome when you process the image on the computer( by making“ visible” the channel the infrared data was captured on). I also could not pre-visualize the image( like in film or digital photography) as my eyes could not see the levels of infrared light reflected off different objects, which introduced another element of chance in imagemaking.
The idea for BOUNDED NATURE came about when I was thinking of how to push infrared photography beyond the tropes of white trees and dark skies. I realized that certain images in my abandoned project would work in falsecolor infrared, that dandelion would“ pop” from the sidewalk crack without having to sacrifice compositional context. This started me thinking on how we are taught to see and visualize the world through the tropes of photography. Nature in landscape photographs is grand, heroic, and exotic; and is largely invisible in urban photography. I saw this as a metaphor for urban dwellers’ cultivated unconscious on our larger environmental impacts- where the idea of Nature only exists in an idealized form but is suppressed in the day to day.