2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptation
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print this pageLittle Romances
Jordanna Kalman
Saturday, November 11 - 1:55PM to 2:25PM
I believe in good photography. However over the past couple years I've felt that to better express myself I need more from a photograph than just a picture. It could very well be a reaction to the oversaturation of photographs in our culture, trying to make my visual voice heard over the thrum. In 2015 my mother died very suddenly. At the time I had been working on a series about memory, removing figures from my older photos and after her death I shifted what I was doing and began to remove figures from my more current work, representing my grief. This series is called Invisible.
In sharing this work online, sometimes it is treated with respect and I am credited, but many times not. Having my work be passed around, seeing it used merely as content, having no control over something that is so connected to me is upsetting. My most recent series, Little Romances, is in part a reaction to my previous work's recurrent misappropriation and my interest in treating a photograph as an object.
When considered as an object the photograph exists physically in the world, it belongs to someone; it gets held, it has weight, value. By rephotographing prints of my photographs, they become a physical object; my object. I surround them with elements from my garden or other personal objects not to evoke nostalgia or sentimentality but to deepen my physical connection to these photographs and distance them from the viewer.
This gives me more of a sense of control and protection of the emotions I put into the photographs when shooting them.
My presentation speaks about my current series, how it evolved and about sharing personal work in a content driven society.
speaker
Jordanna Kalman
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