Two Albums (2005)

A photo-installation from 2005, Two Albums features sixteen digitally altered photographs exhibited as large, colour LightJet prints. The images are paired and presented in two ways, offering viewers different modes of engaging with the work. In four works, the paired photographs are mounted back to back in a frame and suspended from the gallery ceiling so that viewers can walk around to see both sides. The photographs in the other four pairs are framed individually and hang on the wall. In each pair of photographs, one is an aged black and white image from an earlier era, found in an old family album, and the other is a more contemporary colour snapshot taken in a family context. A section of image from each photograph is digitally exchanged with a section of image in the same shape from the other photograph. In this way, each photograph is both missing visual information and is also disrupted by contrasting visual information from another image. Despite the differences in era and specific circumstances in each of the two photographs, they are paired because of their similar representation of human experience. Belonging to the same photographic archetype – the baby photo, the family snapshot or the class photo, for example – the paired photographs examine our universally shared desire, across time and geography, to use photography and its externally accepted conventions to shape our personal histories.