Jason Kates van Staveren

These back-lit transparencies construct narrative via the "cut" between the images of the diptych.  Slides harvested from the inherited collection of Dr. Richard B. Fischer are re-contextualized.  In an effort to embrace and, if possible, further the work and legacy of Dr. Fischer birds are connected visually with humans.

This connection alludes to the work of another renowned natural scientist, John Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology who said in his talk, Birds can Save the World that he was hopeful we could, "move to a world in which human cultures and natural systems [can] live side by side."

Borrowing from the visual vocabulary of catalog photography I seek to advertise the beauty I see as latent in these typically overlooked and quickly discarded objects. Photographing and re-presenting these items plays with our understanding of the line between subject and representation, they masquerade as one thing while revealing themselves to be another when examined more closely.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin wrote, “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.”  I read this to mean that simply by enlarging, and by extension, merely by creating the image, a photographer can change the viewer’s experience of the subject into something else entirely.

My images are clearly knowable as their subjects, yet through mediation of their scale, they are transformed into something else.  They contain both truth and fiction and I embrace this paradox.

Borrowing from the visual vocabulary of catalog photography I seek to advertise the beauty I see as latent in these typically overlooked and quickly discarded objects. Photographing and re-presenting these items plays with our understanding of the line between subject and representation, they masquerade as one thing while revealing themselves to be another when examined more closely.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin wrote, “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.”  I read this to mean that simply by enlarging, and by extension, merely by creating the image, a photographer can change the viewer’s experience of the subject into something else entirely.

My images are clearly knowable as their subjects, yet through mediation of their scale, they are transformed into something else.  They contain both truth and fiction and I embrace this paradox.

A collection made when traveling, these are photographed in a Holga camera on transparency film.  The interaction between organic seeming light leaks and hard concrete was the initial attraction.  I found myself not paying as much attention to steering as I should, and thought it strange that I could find such seductive beauty in such a “non-environment”.  The serendipitous nature of film and a plastic point-and-shoot camera, combined with clamoring around under highways, keeps them exciting to make.

Every residence I occupied from the house I grew up in through the one I lived in when the project was made.  In the margin are life-size reproductions of collected ephemera from the time period associated with the given house.  Together these serve as time capsules, odes, proxy portraits.