Images of Images
Most of these images were drawn from a large group of anonymous photographs collected by my mother, Cornelia Noland Reis. Her fascination with photography was rooted in her 1930’s childhood, a time when printed photographs circulated widely and, along with moving images, commanded a dominant role in visual communication. Cornelia collected photographs steadily throughout adulthood, making regular visits to flea markets and antique shops in search of the bizarre and offbeat within vernacular imagery. Later, with the advent of eBay in the mid-1990s, she became obsessed, spending hours online every day, sifting through hundreds and eventually many thousands of predominantly anonymous photographs, purchasing a steady stream of them.
In short order Cornelia amassed a wide array of formal and informal images, generally paying only modest sums. Her omnivorous eye for the ironic and bizarre took center stage as she dwelled on the foibles of human behavior. She seemed to intuitively align with Roland Barthes’s notion of punctum, the “sensory, intensely subjective effect of a photograph on a viewer”, as the scholar Séamus Kealy so neatly put it. She amassed a wide array of images that delivered just such an effect, and her New York City apartment became crowded with her expanding collection. Her eye skewed heavily towards subjects who were far from ordinary, opting for x-rays of character that highlighted the bizarre and ironic, most often finding her way to individuals who were flawed, eccentric, sometimes violent or kinky. At first, Cornelia curated groups of images in loosely themed three-ring binders. Over time, however, the binders multiplied and most often ended up fat and overflowing, with juxtaposed images made into splashy chapters that were ordered by increasingly subtle and nuanced themes.
My deep interest in her project came in the early 2000s, at a time when digital photography was superseding film-based production. With her permission, I started work on a project, Images of Images, that was based primarily on photographs within her collection. I began by carefully re-photographing salient portions of the chosen images in natural light, in the process cropping and reframing the originals to highlight particular nuances. I chose small black & white prints no larger than 8x10, although most were considerably smaller than that. After digitally enlarging the image files, I erased and replaced details as well as adding imagined color, printing them at large scale to depict the subjects at or near life-size.
The images I selected from Cornelia’s collection were most often prints that had a history as objects circulating in the world, often with small creases and general wear and tear that spoke to their having been handled repeatedly by human hands. A significant subset of them bore the markings of having been edited, sometimes with crop marks or scrawled notations written directly on the prints. Others had clumsy splashes of color that had been added somewhere along the way in their history. In my transformations of the original images, I concentrate on drawing out the character of the portrait subjects, achieved especially by the introduction of invented color absent in the originals. In homage to Cornelia’s editing prowess, many of my finished pieces conjoin two images that seem to be related, placing them in conversation due to similarities or differences, with the intention of generating a shiver.
In these re-thought images of the past, my intention is to retrospectively extract the most immediate sense of photographic moments that occurred long ago. I lay bare the evidence of their age and history of having been handled, while simultaneously endeavoring to inject them with a feeling of immediacy, of being in the present. My overarching intention is to enhance and further dramatize what it might have been that drew Cornelia to them in the first place.