Artist Statements

alibis is a completed project (and book) of recording film photographs made between 1971 and 1982. The work began when I studied at the Visual Studies Workshop with Nathan Lyons, and ended when my practice shifted to color photography.

Alibis are proofs of presence. We lead parsed lives. We are in one place, and not another. We believe and feel one way, and not another. And, we look at experience through one construction, and not another. The record of the visual choices to create certainty in a contingent world are the alibis of our lives. alibis is organized across four complementary chapters that present an extended visual statement:

Like the B-roll in a noir film, understudies establish a context, an overall atmosphere, for actions in the foreground. In the absence of those actions, these images step into an enigmatic leading role and assert their own presence.

After the parade of experience has passed, gleanings mark the unintended residue of its passage, and the intended legacy of its presence. Image upon image, meaning slowly coheres.

The figure emerges or returns to announce its presence against an undefined ground through its postcards from here. Not all we portray about ourselves is true. Yet there is truth.

We can mark where we have been and where we are. The moments when we anticipate our future presence through these marks are our endings first seen. We cannot portray the proofs of our future. We can imagine only that we looked and the future ended.

Lies is an ongoing project that creates dialogues between paired vernacular photographs. My art and practice are in the creation of these diptychs. The diptych is the image. I use this format to explore the intersecting themes of creativity (images 1-6), identity (images 7-12), and mortality (images 13-18).

I source individual vernacular photographs in multiple formats from antique markets, the internet, and my own family albums. All the photographs are digitized, extractively cropped for content and composition, and desaturated. They are then rebuilt with a uniform 2:3 ratio, tonal range, and grain structure. As a second stage, I combine separate images into the diverse dialogues of these diptychs. The added photo corners suggest a curated album of provocative memories. These edits and pairings assert the mendacity of memory in creating a unifying point of view and narrative parity amongst the images it stores.

This project began when I became our family historian with thousands of intergenerational photographs. I realized that I could sequence them into radically different, if not better, narratives than had been lived. My practice in Lies thus starts with the malleability of history, and with the belief that photography is a tool for visual thinking. What is in the foreground for me at this point in life is thinking about creativity (what are the sources and permissions for my own expression?), identity (what is carried throughout life and what is the capacity for change?), and mortality (what are the ways to comprehend the mystery of death?).

Contact: paulsteinalibis@gmail.com