Interpolations
Gustave Le Gray laid out a ‘theory of sacrifices’ in the 19th century in which detail was sacrificed in the interest of the overall impression of the image. After the turn of the century, Atget intuitively made a habit of deploying large sections of graphic, inky darkness within his epic descriptions of Paris in morning light. In this series, erasures and insertions both focus and obscure the color images. These photographs have been altered long after being taken, placing them within the realm of elision and editing that has been a part of photographic practice since its infancy. The images here were taken predominantly on film. They have been cropped, partially erased and filled, and then printed at large scale to both distill and amplify their meaning.