benjamin wooten

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After building a camera, my first thought has traditionally been: "What kind of images ought this camera to take?" Similarly, if I imagine a set of images I would like to create, I always ask myself: "What kind of camera ought these images be taken by?" Unfortunately, this strict way of thinking through cameras and photographs causes me problems. Part of the issue, I am coming to realize, is that I have a somewhat casual interest in photographs. I certainly like a great many photographs, though perhaps my inconsistent attentions make me as equally mediocre a photographer as I am an intermittent object-maker. What I can state with certainty is that I do have an abiding interest in photography as an event, as an historical apparatus, and sometimes as a document manufactory. Whatever space I am attempting to occupy with my work, it is certainly not that of the cult-of-the-primacy-of-the-image crowd of so-called fine art photographers, or even many amateur lo-fi enthusiasts, with whom I share both an appelation and delight for the imperfect technical interface of the handmade. I base this upon what I have read in historical and contemporary scholarly texts on photography, contributions to internet photography forums and blogs, and what I have seen in most photographic exhibitions.

I find the language of 'creation,' more often than 'capture,' helps me think meaningfully about photography as a practice. I understand capture as the mechanism involved in making photographic images, however I am mostly drawn to the dense web of falsehoods surrounding photography. These falsehoods, whether implicit or explicit, confound attempts to assign varying levels of reality or authenticity to a given photographic image. In many senses photography is a den of lies, made all the more potent not only because of most people's tacit acceptance of photographic reality, but also due to the ubiquity of photographic tools, imagery, and practice. Photography, after all, is the correlative embrace of professionalism and amateurism, from fine-art studio to vernacular imagery, from hi-technology to low-fidelity and everything in between. Practiced and debated as such, photography is a phenomenon that actively defies categorizations and absolute location on an existential scale.

What I'd really like to share about my practice, however - and inasmuch as this website is concerned - is not the technical details of each image or device, but to say that I regularly revisit completed devices and imagery and add to or subtract work from them. I frequently create photographic images that I have never printed, and do not often give much thought to printing. I shoot a few images with a camera one year and then don't touch it again for another two years, then pick it up and use it to take pictures of entirely different subjects. I like to rename the cameras, refigure where they or the photographs might fit on the photographic spectrum, often in direct relationship to a recent article or book I've just read. I agonize over whether or not some of the cameras even ought to create images in the first place, or whether making those images would deplete the camera as a discrete object... and so I sometimes just make functional cameras as objects with a determined amount of potential energy. This is the ubiquitous spectre of the unattended camera; whether it is looking through me as much as I look through it.