NOISE PRINTS

In this series entitled “Noise”, Hollingsworth explores the interiority of the camera itself, its ways of looking on our behalf, which we come to feel as our “normal” mode of seeing. Abstract and textural, these images suggest woven fabrics. In fact, they are visual records of the camera’s internal digital processes—how a camera works. In essence, Hollingsworth is locating his eye “inside the body of the camera”—so that the camera as our “eye” --not the world, and not a digital editing-program--is what produces the visual information. In these abstract/physical images, most representational content is emptied from the picture. Light spots or streaks are the only exterior referents, signaling the environment in which these images are produced, the patterns that the camera ”sees” when we ask it to look and record on our behalf. Color is controlled by the camera’s pre-set Kelvin-temperatures. Exposure settings are shallow, and so, in order to reveal the “patterned noise” underneath a dark image, the photographs become hyper-exposed. Accordingly, the sensor-bindings of the digital camera almost entirely blanket the image-field, and a grid of light (or blips of light, bright information) emerges, as a kind of glowing visual net, or fabric-like texture.

FALSE REALISM

The speed of technological innovation results in the proliferation of waste; what can and do these “vintage” devices reveal about our world? Using discarded cameras abandoned in the garbage dump, Hollingsworth cultivates the camera’s misreadings, misrepresentations, and sometimes inability to read the world, literally with a “broken worldview”, into surreal and very often unexpected landscapes.

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PHOTOGRAPHY  PROJECTS

ALL PHOTOS  BY  TUCKAGHRIE HOLLINGSWORTH

PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT

URBAN PARKLAND SERIES

Using wayside parks and undeveloped land, Hollingsworth creates images which explore boundaries between pastoral and urban, structure and disorder, color and light. These photographs rely on scarce light sources--a full moon, a dim street lamp, or simply ambient light. Instead of passively brightening the subjects, light imposes order and becomes a palpable force, eliciting lyrical qualities from otherwise mundane landscapes.

HIGHWAY SERIES

Shot along rural stretches of highway, these images reflect on the American propensity for wandering. They engage the play of traffic and the moon (as a symbol for wanderlust) while Hollingsworth is “wearing” a camera (documenting the physical performance of the photographer walking the street, crossing the highway). “I am afoot,” says Walt Whitman the quintessential American poet, “with my vision.”

PRAIRIE

In these works Hollingsworth turns the camera lens to broad inclusive landscape, using the horizon as a symbol for the experience of time and memory. In long hand-held shots, relying on moon-light and traffic headlamps for light-source, the artist layers horizons by his attempts to stand still, letting the world move: these images record photographic performance and the camera’s response to time. The images “see” several moments of a place simultaneously, in “single” expressions. They reveal both memory and revery, how a place can seem multiple and also individually itself, in a single moment.

SHADOW

Hollingsworth’s first narrative series, the images consider imprecision. Attaching the camera to his body while he walks the blocks of the neighborhoods of his childhood, the progression of photos pass through blur and focus around the outline of an empty/absent figure. Memory is both sharp and often imprecise where shadow enters.

FINGERPRINTS

In these small-scaled pieces Hollingsworth works with the most common image-technology of our age, the high-tech camera-phone. He explores both its new relation to the “self” and its highly-developed technological possibilities, which facilitate automation (relying paradoxically on a “liberating” lack of choice on the part of the photographer). The artist creates images and interferes with them using his finger--his finger as a pastiche of identity. In an era of “selfies,” memoirs, and new technologies, our concepts of subjectivity are changing. No longer simply the object of the camera’s “gaze,” the self is often the technology or process by which the self is developed, recorded, exposed.

INFORMATION, IN FORMATION

In an extension of the “Noise” series, this suite of studies suggests a recognizable image caught within the digital structure of code-patterns. In effect hybridizations, these photos coalesce information both inside the camera (digital code) as well as nearly-legibly what the camera is looking at, just about at the fulcrum when a camera approaches an ability to read the world. Both material and subject, they are literally about information, in formation. Made in JPEG digital code, the most dominantly used image-language currently, data is averaged out, saw-toothed jagged patterns emerge, admitting the camera’s bias in its point of view.