TV

I love to photograph the television! It is a never-ending stream of interesting and well-composed imagery at my fingertips.

The old CRT tubes are best, but any TV will do. The effects created by the low-resolution pixelization are always unpredictable, and by varying the angle of the shot, and the length of exposure, you can further increase the distortion of the image. Photographing the face of a beautiful woman on TV can create an instant abstract image of incredible character; effects that really cannot be produced any other way.

This is a technique first presented to me by a mentor, an Australian photographer I met while living in Korea. In many ways he set me on the path to the Avant Garde. I have expanded and refined the technique a bit (yes it is slightly more complicated than pointing the camera at the TV), and with the addition of closed captioning text, the resulting images (see “The Evil Democracy” below), can be quite stimulating.

There is something quite interesting to me as well, in that this technique uses an existing image to make another “new” image. This is a theme that recurs throughout my work.