Aspen
Hochhalter

The Reclamation of Silver Series

The Reclamation of Silver Series is an aesthetic exploration of the remnants of my own production as a photographer working with wet processes. I am immensely curious about chemical interactions that occur within the wet-darkroom and I am always exploring ways to create imagery and texture that I can manipulate with other imagery in the digital-darkroom. Reclamation images are created from appropriated silver gelatin prints that have been half developed or fixed and discarded. These discards are from my own as well as communal darkrooms. Most of the trash I appropriated is completely abstract, created through the unpredictable convergence of chemical stain, light and its placement in the trashcan. Other times, distorted relics from the original image peek through the chemical stain the intended image of the photographer no longer recognizable. I utilize the digital-darkroom to translate and enlarge the small scraps into large pieces that magnify the textures, tonalities and the fortuitous incidents that led to this image. The unique visual characteristics that emerge from these salvages are then re-interpreted digitally until an often abstracted and serendipitous dreamscape reveals itself. This collecting of appropriated imagery is my attempt to discover value from the waste produced in my art making and teaching; exploring the medium of photography itself - expanding the framework of what constitutes a photograph. I am choosing, with this series, to escape from the confines of the presumed representational nature of photography and opening my work up to the infinite and undefined.