My original urbansurfaces series was a collection of “straight” photographs, made on film and printed in a darkroom. In addition, it was foundational to the meaning of those images that they were straight, unmanipulated documents of the world as it exists around us.
My access to traditional photo media diminished in the early aughts, as film materials started dropping off the market when digital photography began emerging as the new normal. I started exploring urbansurfaces using a digital camera. Knowing that all the rules had changed, I shifted from the rule that the photographs needed to be "pure document" and started allowing myself free rein to alter the subject digitally. I was starting to consume the found textures and adapt them, using them to create an image: approaching the process more like a painter and less like a documentarian.
My favorite efforts from that time are moderately crude manipulations involving mirroring of image components, along with enhancement of color and contrast. I was also exploring early applications of filtering to enhance graininess, roughness, and a sense of wear. The subject matter remains 'surfaces found in an urban environment', but these images are less documentary and more painterly.
At the time I was making these new digital urbansurfaces, my digital equipment was not capable of making the high-resolution photographs that I’d made with the original photographic series. Largely for this reason, these only exist as digital images; I never printed them.
Compared to the extensive investment of time, materials, and effort to create the original urbansurfaces photographic prints, these were exuberantly lightweight and more or less cost-free to create. As a result, once I'd embraced the lack of print output, I created a relatively high volume of images. At the time that I archived the collection you see here, I set aside about forty images as my favorites. That's a lot, so I'll post in parts.
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The images in this group (part 1) feel related by color, shape, linearity, and texture. All of the images from this time period are mirrored in two or more directions; this set is all mirrored only once, vertically. All of these feel formal and darkly elegant.
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