He Too Wonders if He Might Have Made a Mistake   wet plate collodion photographic print and mixed media on glass and aluminum 20 x 20″  $2000

 This body of work (‘seen and not seen’) uses pre-film photography and mixed media to explore the illusory intimacy of social media. Through ongoing analog explorations my work speaks to our individually curated and constructed realities in the digital world. Referencing the history of portraiture-as-social-mirror, I am fascinated with the connection between early photographic portraits and modern selfies. With the advent of tintypes in the 1860’s we entered a world where, for the first time in history, images of the “self” were widely distributed for mass consumption. Collected, carried, and viewed at will, tintypes became a method to have a physical connection to loved ones near and far, and to imagine the lives of strangers, by looking into their faces.

These pieces function on multiple levels, revealing/concealing information, dependent upon viewing angle and distance. As the primary tool of social media, the cellphone provides yet another way to engage with my work. As social media has the effect of distorting and compressing our lives, viewing my work through the cellphone camera compresses and distorts what we see, giving the viewer the illusion of seeing more clearly.

Greg Martin