An Unclear View is an exhibition of still and moving images exploring manipulation and photographic truth. On view at the Indie Grits Labs September 26, 2019 – November 22, 2019.
Included in the show is my project “Waiting for Apollo XI” a re-telling of a short scene from an 8mm home-movie shot in the late 1960’s. The original footage on the left shows an elderly couple sitting on Adirondack chairs on an unknown beach. The man is dressed in black slacks, Oxford shoes, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. He is fanning himself with a fedora hat while the woman, who is dressed in a black jumper with white loafers, gestures to him. The image on the right is the same set-up, only now we have a subtle shadow of towers and a shuttle launch in the distance. The meaning of the image is altered from an elderly couple chit-chatting on the beach to the same couple waiting for the launch of Apollo XI, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon in 1969. Hundreds of people lined the beaches to witness the launch of Apollo 11 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. When creating this piece, I was exploring the idea of introducing the 8mm films, that had never been digitized or uploaded online, to an online image database. How would the footage and images be tagged or classified by the algorithms that “see” our digital images? How do automated systems that archive our digital lives and memories have the potential to re-write history through mislabeling and misinterpretation?
