2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageThe Image is Broken: A Case for Object Integration
Delaney Hoffman
Saturday, March 21 - 9:30AM to 10:00AM
Atlanta 1
At some point in 2021 I experienced a fundamental shift in my photographic practice; the silver gelatin prints that I had been carefully making for so many years no longer felt like enough. I was working at a ceramic glaze manufacturing company and found myself frustrated by the material fragility of my pictures; I wanted them to be able to work as hard as I was working at my factory job.
In "The Image is Broken", I will present two bodies of work that further examine why and how I embarked on a mission to make my images invincible by integrating photography and craft through the incorporation of wood, epoxy, acrylic, and other materials. The first of these, "Common Knowledge" (2022-2024), explores the tenuous divide between our analog and digital lives and probes at the way that this blurred line abstracts our perceptions of blue-collar labor. The second, "Bootleg Prophit" (current project) picks at myriad mystic traditions, pulling influence from prophetic books of the Old Testament, various New Age appropriations from the 1970s-1980s, and anabaptist craft traditions as a means of exploring the efficacy of enchantment and the discipline of belief. As this project is in progress, its questions are open-ended: What does it mean to allow ourselves to "fall prey" to a prophetic personality? What does it mean to choose to believe, to prove that we believe?
In addition to presenting selections of my own work, I will begin by contextualizing my practice within the broader photography landscape by touching on both peers and predecessors whose work pushes the bounds of image/object, including Thomas Barrow, Meridel Rubenstein, Jesse Ly, Erin Jane Nelson, and Sam Margevicius. With these artists and myself as examples, I will present an argument for a "cyborgian method" of image making that pushes photographs into the world as activated objects through their literal dimensionality.
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